This is a small tip, but so exciting that I couldn’t resist sharing (nerd alert…). You probably have a feature-rich word-counting tool, or a TM tool that does complicated word counts. But let’s say that you want to do a quick-and-dirty word count of a bunch of files without opening them one by one. Like say this morning, a client e-mailed me 23 Word files and said “Don’t sink a whole lot of time into this, but roughly how long and how much?”…that kind of thing. Here’s your solution, at least in Windows:
- In Windows Explorer, navigate to the folder
- Right-click in the folder window, and select View, then Details
- Right-click on any of the column headers in the folder window, for example “Name,” “Date modified,” etc.
- Click “More”
- Tick the “Word count” box in the list of options (visual aid below)
This will add a “Word count” column to your folder view, and the word count for any countable file will be displayed, like this:
How exciting! This is a mashup of tips I culled from various forums, and works for all countable files on Windows 7. If anyone has a procedure for other Windows versions or for Mac, feel free to share it.