well, Word displays, on the status bar, a variety of information that can help you while you are writing. For instance, the status bar shows the number of pages in the document and the line number on the current page. One thing that would be helpful is if the status bar showed the number of words in the document, as you were typing.
Such a feature is not built in to Word, however. The status bar is not reconfigurable via a macro, other than to show or hide the entire bar or write a message to it. Coding a macro that continually wrote a message to the status bar would mean the normal information would not get shown, so a solution that uses the status bar is probably not acceptable.
It is possible to write a macro that would continuously check the word count in a document, and then display the result in another area of the document, such as the title bar or a toolbar button. Depending on the type of system you have, such a solution may not be acceptable; you will need to conduct some tests to see if it is. The internal code to calculate the word count for a document is rather slow, particularly as your documents get larger. This means that constantly checking the word count could slow down your entire system, perhaps to an unacceptable degree.
Answered by R.P. Singh
at
5:46 PM on July 22, 2008