Google Docs “live Word Count” Is Strange and Exists
Google has officially released the most useful addition to Docs we’ve seen in years: word counts. Or, to be more specific, a function that allows you to get the current word count for any document you are working on. This is much more convenient than clicking through menus to see static word counts all the time. However, there is one important caveat.
Oddly enough, the real-time word count does not appear whenever you start a new document on the desktop, and there is no way to turn it on by default for every new document you start. You need to manually enable this feature in each of them, which you can do by clicking Tools> Word Count> Display word count when typing.
When you do, a small popup will appear in the lower left corner, indicating the current word count.
This count is fairly accurate with one glaring error (for now). As reported by Android Police , the word counting feature is currently limited to 20,000 characters. Walk past this and you will be informed that you have “reached the limit of the number of words visible when you type.”
We’re not sure if this is a real bug or an intended feature, but it limits the usefulness of word counts if you’re working on a long enough document. We will let you know if Google changes (or fixes) this feature in the future.