Massive Word Count Difference: Pages vs. Word

[gnomeisland]

I recently started using Pages a lot more since getting an iPad and I discovered that the word count in Pages is sometimes VERY different than MS Word. Some times almost double what Word reports. Is anyone else seeing this?! I get paid by the word in some instances so an accurate word count is critical (but also something I've got to backup if my client's are seeing something very different)

 

[balamw]

Have you tried verifying it yourself?

Extract a bit of text from a project where you see such a difference and take just the smallest possible piece where you can detect the difference and then count the words manually or save as text and use the Terminal utility "wc".

B

 

[CoMoMacUser]

Thanks for the heads up. I, too, get paid by the word and wasn't aware of this discrepancy. Let us know what you find out.

 

[hologram]

Here's a free app designed to do just that. Even if you don't use it regularly, you can check your Pages/Word counts against it and see which is more accurate:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11111/word-counter

 

[metril]

You know, this could be a very simple thing of what is considered a word. Perhaps either Pages or Word does not count "a" or "to" or "so"; see where I'm going with this? There could be a minimum letter count.

 

[Janichsan]

Or Word is simply slow. It sometimes takes ages to fully count all words in a document.

 

[gnomeisland]

Or Word is simply slow. It sometimes takes ages to fully count all words in a document.

Nope. Keep the document open for hours sometimes and, yes Word is slow, but it sticks to a lower word count. I've been trying to find the difference but if anything Pages seems more conservative on blocks of text that I compare but the latest overall document is over double (15,994 vs. 7,704)!

I haven't tried the suggested program yet. I'm not really sure what that's supposed to prove aside from introducing another variable?

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You know, this could be a very simple thing of what is considered a word. Perhaps either Pages or Word does not count "a" or "to" or "so"; see where I'm going with this? There could be a minimum letter count.

When small words are selected in both they are both recognized as one word. I thought it was the very technical language of the documents I have been working on lately but I still can't narrow it down.

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Have you tried verifying it yourself?

Extract a bit of text from a project where you see such a difference and take just the smallest possible piece where you can detect the difference and then count the words manually or save as text and use the Terminal utility "wc".

B

Just tried this and the number came much closer (within 1,000 words) so I'm guessing there's some double counting in Word docs opened in Pages (be warned!) Let me know if anyone else is seeing this.

 

[hologram]

I haven't tried the suggested program yet. I'm not really sure what that's supposed to prove aside from introducing another variable?

Well, if the count matches either Pages or Word, you'll know which one is more accurate. It's only another variable if it doesn't match, or at least come close to, either one.

It's free... what have you got to lose?

 

[monokakata]

I'm guessing there's some double counting in Word docs opened in Pages (be warned!) Let me know if anyone else is seeing this.

If you're comparing Word's count for its native document with the word count that Pages gives you when you import a Word document there, then maybe the Word-Pages conversion is messing up the count.

Consider taking your Word document and, in Word, causing it to be written out as a text file (plain text). Then, import the plain text document into Pages and see what you get.

I took a simple document that Word reported as 177 words. I wrote it out as text and sent it to my iPhone (the only place I have, or want, Pages) and Pages reported that document as 185 words.

However, the Word document had 2 URLs in it. When I removed them from Pages, the word counts matched exactly. Word obviously treats a URL as one word, while Pages counts the words within it.

Just another data point.