# OpenOffice Writer Word Count



## mosaix (Apr 21, 2015)

I've been trying out OpenOffice Writer as an alternative to Word. One drawback, especially for the writing challenges, is that the word count seems wildly inaccurate. It seems to count opening speech marks as a word but, strangely, not closing speech marks.

Normally, for the challenges, I use the word count as a rough guide and then count the individual words as a final check, but Writer over-counted by 13 words! So it's not even a rough guide. 

Anyone else suffering with this? Any work around?


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## Ursa major (Apr 21, 2015)

I'm hoping that 13-word over-count is for a 300-worder....

Note that Word can over-count wildly, although I've found it varies between versions of Word. What seems to catch it out are certain punctuation marks: some marks, such as the ellipsis, can be counted as words even when attached to a word; others are counted when standing on their own. So it may be that while the count is inaccurate, it may not be as inaccurate as you think.


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## mosaix (Apr 21, 2015)

Nope, it's for the 75! Word count of 76, manual count of 63! And I wondered why I was struggling!

I've been using Word as distributed in Office 2000 for years (since 2000 in fact) and I've always found its word count to be amazingly accurate (apart from hyphens and dashes). I'm dreading starting work on this month's 300.


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## Ursa major (Apr 21, 2015)

Thirteen extra words out of 63! 

Have you tried it on any other text? And is it as inaccurate with those?


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## mosaix (Apr 21, 2015)

Not accurate with anything, UM. It counts every opening quote as an additional word. Impossible to rely on.


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## Ursa major (Apr 21, 2015)

I typed "OpenOffice Writer " into Google, wondering if it was a known problem (and with a known solution), and before I could type another character, Google offered a string of options, the first of which was:

openoffice writer word count​
Seems it's a hot issue.


*EDIT*: The issue seems to be that many users couldn't find it. Lucky beggars....


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## mosaix (Apr 21, 2015)

I did the same, UM. Came across a bug report in 2007 marked as 'fixed' in version 3.something in 2011. I'm on version 4.something. Looks like my understanding of the word 'fixed' isn't the same as other peoples.


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## TheDustyZebra (Apr 21, 2015)

Yes, I had that problem with NaNoWriMo -- I reached my 50k word count on the last day (back in 2010), turned in my words, and I was 600 words short! I had to come up with another 600 at the last minute. That is, incidentally, where the prologue came from. 

I did subsequently figure out, by way of 75s and 300s, that it was the quotation marks lousing things up.


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## Ray McCarthy (Apr 21, 2015)

mosaix said:


> OpenOffice Writer as an alternative to Word


Open Office is Depreciated ages ago. The active & better fork is Libre Office.
http://www.libreoffice.org/

I used to use Star Office (the original of the family), then Open Office, now Libre Office. Basically Oracle upset the Open Office developers so they forked and renamed it Libre Office.

It's unlikely now that bugs get fixed in Open Office.


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## AnyaKimlin (May 23, 2015)

I'm also using LibreOffice and have never had any trouble.  I didn't actually realise Open Office was still running but then I just use what I find on the computer


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## Moonbat (May 30, 2015)

I use open office and yes I have found it to have issues with word counts.
I often find it over counts but mainly because it counts things like - and ( as words.
I think I've got used to it over the years so now I know which things will be over counted.
I think my 75 word entry for May has - either side of the opening and closing lines so I knew they would be miscounted.
the problem mainly lies with punctuation, particularly if you are using things other than commas and full stops.
I usually check a line at a time too, just so I can tell if it is adding extra bits here and there.
There are some options for things like the amount of characters required for hyphenation which might help, but I haven't found anything specific to altering the way it counts words.


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## Ray McCarthy (May 31, 2015)

Upgrade to the now better Libre Office.
http://www.libreoffice.org/


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