Microsoft makes many useful apps alongside its operating system, and its productivity apps are probably the most popular among users. These apps include a note taking application (Notepad), a basic text editor (WordPad) and the Productivity Suite (MS Office).
Microsoft WordPad is a really useful tool for very basic text editing. It is used mainly to write very basic content creations like Reports or letters that needs more flexibility than what Notepad provides.
Since WordPad is just a basic text editor, it lacks some advanced features. These include but are not limited to word counter, and grammar checking tool. The word counter is a very important tool since it can be used to keep note of an impending word limit.
How To Count Words In WordPad?
The short answer to this question is: you cannot!
Since WordPad is very basic in its function, it does not have an inbuilt word counter tool. Since it also does not plug-ins, there is no way to install and use a third party tool from within the application itself.
All hope is not lost though. Understanding this dilemma of many such users, there are other workarounds that can be used to count words in WordPad.
Use An Online Word Counter For WordPad Word Counts
With nearly everything available online nowadays, this problem can be solved as well using online word counters. The basic premise of all these counters is very similar. You need to copy and paste the content that you wrote into the input field of the counter.
After you hit submit, the word count will be displayed either as a message, or as a side note.
You can visit https://wordcounter.net/ to use their word counter. There are some other features present as well like Thesaurus etc.
For exact character counts, you can visit https://www.lettercount.com/ to count characters in your text.
Use Free Office Alternatives
If you are a regular writer and need something reliable, pasting your work again and again online can be tiring. Also, the Microsoft Office Suite can be costly for basic text editing only.
You can use open-source software available to solve this dilemma. There are many good free alternatives to Microsoft Office Suite that can help you out.
The popular choices include LibreOffice (download) and Apache’s OpenOffice (download).
These are free text editors with many features that are similar to MS Office. You will also find that there is an inbuilt spelling and grammar checking tool alongside the word counter as well. You can check these out if you do not wish to invest in a premium productivity suite.
Wrapping Up
So there you have it. Now you know how to measure WordPad word count using the online counters and free alternatives given above. Comment below and tell us which productivity suite you prefer.
