Microsoft Word vs. Abiword Word Counts. [Solved]

Margarita Skies · Aug 20, 2011

Hey,

I have used Abi Word in the past, but when I compare its word count to Microsoft Word, it appears to be that it's off by 400 words or so. In other words a document that has 39,900 words on Abi Word for example, has 39,500 words on Microsoft Word. My question is, which word-count do you think is more accurate? I am thinking on installing Abi Word on another computer just for its word count capability because I only have one license left to use in Office and I don't want to waste it on a loaned computer. Thanks in advance for your help!!

Magali.

Mac H. · Aug 20, 2011

Those numbers are within 1% of each other. That's plenty accurate enough.

There is often no 'right' answer. Look at the sentence above. Is '1%' a word? It could be counted as not a word - or be counted as one word or be counted as two words! Is '10:01pm' one word or five? (Or is it 'ten' 'Oh' 'one' 'pm' ? Should the word processor realise that '10' is usually pronounced as a single word, but '01' would be pronounced as two words?) Is "10:01pm" different to "10:01 pm"?

Worst still are web addresses: eg: "www.google.com/patents" That might be one word or four.

'The children played tug-of-war.The cat sat on the mat.' How many words is that? There was a typo (no space between 'war' & 'The') which means they may count as a single word using some methods. And is 'tug-of-war' really three words or only one?

There is no right answer.

Mac

Margarita Skies · Aug 20, 2011

thanks, mac.

m.

Deleted member 42 · Aug 20, 2011

Doesn't matter; all word processors count words differently; it has to do with the definition of a "word"--do you count dates as a word? What about two-word numbers? What about hyphenated compound nouns like two-word?

Don't sweat it.

Jamesaritchie · Aug 20, 2011

With Word, check to see exactly what's being counted. AbiWord simply counts a word as a word, which is not always accurate, and not something publishers do. When a book is published, white space must be published right along with the ink, so, in general, the higher word count is usually teh most accurate.

Anyway, with Word, you can not only check word count, but character count with and without spaces.

Now, one percent is accurate enough for a novel, but not always for a short story, and when a word processor doesn't count properly, you never know what you're getting.

I'd go with LibreOffice, rather than AbiWord.

blacbird · Aug 20, 2011

Jamesaritchie said:
With Word, check to see exactly what's being counted. AbiWord simply counts a word as a word, which is not always accurate, and not something publishers do. When a book is published, white space must be published right along with the ink, so, in general, the higher word count is usually teh most accurate.

Anyway, with Word, you can not only check word count, but character count with and without spaces.

Now, one percent is accurate enough for a novel, but not always for a short story, and when a word processor doesn't count properly, you never know what you're getting.

I'd go with LibreOffice, rather than AbiWord.

No word-processor I'm aware of accounts accurately for white space. My experience with LibreOffice is that the word counts are consistently about 3% higher than those of MS-Word. A bit of experimentation has convinced me that LO is counting periods, and perhaps other punctuation symbols, as words, which MS-Word does not.

caw

Margarita Skies · Aug 20, 2011

Medievalist said:
Doesn't matter; all word processors count words differently; it has to do with the definition of a "word"--do you count dates as a word? What about two-word numbers? What about hyphenated compound nouns like two-word?

Don't sweat it.

You're right. Thanks.

blacbird said:
No word-processor I'm aware of accounts accurately for white space. My experience with LibreOffice is that the word counts are consistently about 3% higher than those of MS-Word. A bit of experimentation has convinced me that LO is counting periods, and perhaps other punctuation symbols, as words, which MS-Word does not.

caw

Thanks for the valuable information!

Jamesaritchie said:
With Word, check to see exactly what's being counted. AbiWord simply counts a word as a word, which is not always accurate, and not something publishers do. When a book is published, white space must be published right along with the ink, so, in general, the higher word count is usually teh most accurate.

Anyway, with Word, you can not only check word count, but character count with and without spaces.

Now, one percent is accurate enough for a novel, but not always for a short story, and when a word processor doesn't count properly, you never know what you're getting.

I'd go with LibreOffice, rather than AbiWord.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll consider it. I'll wait for a few more opinions and then I am going to mark this inquiry as solved.

Thanks to everyone who responded!
M.

Carmy · Aug 21, 2011

Good luck! How do you like Abiword?

I'm interested in Abiword. I tried to download it but it will not download English GB. I guess I'm stuck with Word 2010 and it's been playing up for days. I'd love to get rid of it but I don't like Open Office. Any other suggestions?

Little Ming · Aug 21, 2011

Jamesaritchie said:
With Word, check to see exactly what's being counted. AbiWord simply counts a word as a word, which is not always accurate, and not something publishers do. When a book is published, white space must be published right along with the ink, so, in general, the higher word count is usually teh most accurate.

Anyway, with Word, you can not only check word count, but character count with and without spaces.

Now, one percent is accurate enough for a novel, but not always for a short story, and when a word processor doesn't count properly, you never know what you're getting.

I'd go with LibreOffice, rather than AbiWord.

Just checked my LibreOffice and AbiWord and they both have this feature. All the numbers were the same except for the "Characters with space"

AbiWord: 77,699
LibreOffice: 78,621

Carmy said:
Good luck! How do you like Abiword?

I'm interested in Abiword. I tried to download it but it will not download English GB. I guess I'm stuck with Word 2010 and it's been playing up for days. I'd love to get rid of it but I don't like Open Office. Any other suggestions?

AbiWord seems to work fine for smaller files, but the more pages I have to scroll through the slower AbiWord feels to me. I use LibreOffice now.

What don't you like about OpenOffice? And have you tried LibreOffice?

Margarita Skies · Aug 21, 2011

I tried LibreOffice but I didn't like the way it looked so I dumped it. Lame, I know. There are things that are way more important than looks.

I like AbiWord, but the vast difference between MS Word and Abi Word word counts throws me off. Yesterday it seemed like I had 78,959 words according to Abi Word. I opened the same manuscript in MS Word and it said I only had 77,422 words!! I was floored!! A difference of over 2,000 words? Really? Dang I wish I had MS Word had more than 3 licenses at a time. I felt as if I had done nothing! Now the same manuscript shows a Word count of 81,039 words in Abi Word and to be honest, I am afraid to open the same file in MS Word because it'll show a little over 79k. In other words according to MS Word I did hardly anything in the whole day because yesterday it showed a word count of 78,067 words. It doesn't seem like a big difference, but a 2,000-word difference between word counts is significant to me. That's the amount of words I aim for on each WIP daily, so of course it matters. I am not going to open the document in Word until I am done with the WIP for the day, at about 10:30 or 11:00 PM. Right now it's 8:07 PM where I live, EST. I will be waiting for more opinions because to me this is very frustrating.

Thanks for all your help guys
Magali.

blacbird · Aug 21, 2011

Magali said:
Yesterday it seemed like I had 78,959 words according to Abi Word. I opened the same manuscript in MS Word and it said I only had 77,422 words!! I was floored!! A difference of over 2,000 words?

Methinks you need to revisit your math books.

In any case, this is a meaningless difference in word-count figures. "About 78,000 words" is as accurate as you need to be in a submission or query.

caw

Little Ming · Aug 21, 2011

Magali said:
I tried LibreOffice but I didn't like the way it looked so I dumped it. Lame, I know. There are things that are way more important than looks.

I like AbiWord, but the vast difference between MS Word and Abi Word word counts throws me off. Yesterday it seemed like I had 78,959 words according to Abi Word. I opened the same manuscript in MS Word and it said I only had 77,422 words!! I was floored!! A difference of over 2,000 words? Really? Dang I wish I had MS Word had more than 3 licenses at a time. I felt as if I had done nothing! Now the same manuscript shows a Word count of 81,039 words in Abi Word and to be honest, I am afraid to open the same file in MS Word because it'll show a little over 79k. In other words according to MS Word I did hardly anything in the whole day because yesterday it showed a word count of 78,067 words. It doesn't seem like a big difference, but a 2,000-word difference between word counts is significant to me. That's the amount of words I aim for on each WIP daily, so of course it matters. I am not going to open the document in Word until I am done with the WIP for the day, at about 10:30 or 11:00 PM. Right now it's 8:07 PM where I live, EST. I will be waiting for more opinions because to me this is very frustrating.

Thanks for all your help guys
Magali.

Why can't you just stick with one word processor?

Margarita Skies · Aug 21, 2011

blacbird said:
Methinks you need to revisit your math books.

In any case, this is a meaningless difference in word-count figures. "About 78,000 words" is as accurate as you need to be in a submission or query.

caw

All right, so I made a stupid mistake in the numbers, but I was typing fast, getting my thoughts written down and I didn't stop to look at the numbers. Doesn't everyone make stupid mistakes at least every once in a while? I mean no disrespect here at all, but come on...anyway...

Aside from that, thanks for your advice, but I don't know which word-count I should trust more, if MS Word's or AbiWord's. Last Word-count check I did, Abi Word counted a little over 83.5k words while MS Word counted 82.2k words or something like that, when I transferred the words I added to my RTF file into my DOC file.

Little Ming said:
Why can't you just stick with one word processor?

Well, if you really need me to explain...

I am using a Dell Laptop that was loaned to me that for some reason can't access the wi-fi internet in my house. It seems the drivers for that hardware need to be updated because the laptop is running Windows XP Professional 2001 version. The computer only has a CD-ROM as an optical drive. My copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 comes in a DVD. The Dell Laptop doesn't have a DVD drive, even DVD ROM, so the program can't be installed from the optical drive. The computer doesn't have access to the internet, so MS Office Home and Student 2010 can't be downloaded from the internet for the product key to be put in to activate the product after download and installation. I burned AbiWord onto a CD-R and installed it on the Dell Computer from the optical drive. Now I am using AbiWord because unless this computer gets access to the internet someday, there's no way I can install MS Office 2010 in it.

I reiterate, I mean no disrespect toward any of you guys, so if you found anything offensive in this post, I apologize in advance. Like I said, we all get our numbers wrong sometime, so I don't think that's that big of a deal either. All right, now that I am done writing up this reply, I am going to go to sleep.

Goodnight to everyone, and thank you for all your opinions. I will mark this thread as solved, and if I've infringed any rules with this post, feel free to report me. No problem.

Sincerely,
M.

kuwisdelu · Aug 21, 2011

Magali said:
Aside from that, thanks for your advice, but I don't know which word-count I should trust more, if MS Word's or AbiWord's. Last Word-count check I did, Abi Word counted a little over 83.5k words while MS Word counted 82.2k words or something like that, when I transferred the words I added to my RTF file into my DOC file

As others have mentioned, it really doesn't matter all that much. If it bothers you much, just average them or something. It's only a 1-2% difference in word count between them, which considering all the different ways one might count words, is perfectly acceptable. No one will reject you for saying 82k words if it's "really" 83k words by someone else's count, because there's no "one true way" to count words anyway.

The difference in the number of words from the beginning of the day and the end of the day should be fairly comparable between both word processors. If you're goal was 2000 words, and there's a different of 100 words or so in the daily word count increase between the two, that's really not so much that it should bother you.

Seriously, for now, just choose one word processor, stick to it until your computer situation is resolved, and only look at its word count if it's going to keep bothering you switching back and forth. Whenever you move back, if you do, just because it had a slightly different word count doesn't mean you all of a sudden wrote less or wrote more; you still made progress, no publisher will reject you based on those kinds of differences, and even if the total difference in the number of words seems large in absolute count, the day-to-day difference — how much you wrote — should be far more similar between the two. There's no need to fret if it's off by a couple hundred words if you wrote a couple thousand.

ETA: From a more writing-philosophical standpoint, I totally get the desire to meet an exact word count goal, but ultimately, whether you write 1867 words vs. 2236 words in one day doesn't matter all that much. They're both very comparable amounts of progress, and because of the day-to-day variation in how much you write, it'll probably all come out equal in the end as far as progress is concerned. If the discrepancy really bothers you, just don't look at it. I promise that the end product won't suffer for it if you only pay attention to one word processor's word count, even if they differ a bit.

blacbird · Aug 21, 2011

Magali said:
I don't know which word-count I should trust more, if MS Word's or AbiWord's.

MS-Word's, IMO. I don't know anything about AbiWord, but I do know that OpenOffice Libre (and earlier versions) does something very similar, in producing a slightly larger word-count (~2%) than MS-Word.

So I got curious. I copied a page of text from one of my stories into a .doc file, and physically counted the words. MS-Word gave the exact number my physical count did. Libre was higher. I'm not entirely sure why, but that's how it came out.

caw

Microsoft Word vs. Abiword Word Counts. [Solved]

Margarita Skies

Mac H.

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Margarita Skies

Deleted member 42

Jamesaritchie

blacbird

Margarita Skies

Carmy

Little Ming

Margarita Skies

blacbird

Little Ming

Margarita Skies

kuwisdelu

Revolutionize the World

blacbird