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Word counting in PowerPoint (and AutoIt script)
Thread poster: Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 04:34
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Mar 11, 2020

Hello everyone

Today I tried helping a colleague figure out what is the word count of a PowerPoint file.

The official method is to go to File > Info > Properties > Advanced > Statistics, or to go to File > Info > Show All Properties. In my colleague's PPTX file, this count was 5800 words.

I tried various other kinds of ways to count the words, but have found the easiest way to double-check the official word count is to print to PDF (e.g. using doPDF or you... See more
Hello everyone

Today I tried helping a colleague figure out what is the word count of a PowerPoint file.

The official method is to go to File > Info > Properties > Advanced > Statistics, or to go to File > Info > Show All Properties. In my colleague's PPTX file, this count was 5800 words.

I tried various other kinds of ways to count the words, but have found the easiest way to double-check the official word count is to print to PDF (e.g. using doPDF or your favourite PDF printer) and then select all text, copy to a text editor, and count. In my colleague's case, this yielded a count of 5000 words (but there was 150 words in Notes, which were not present in the PDF file).

Still, our manual counting deviated from the official word count by a whopping 650 words, and I still have no idea where PowerPoint gets the extra 650 words from.

So, to help me copy all the text from all the slides manually, I wrote a little AutoIt script:
http://www.leuce.com/autoit/PPTX_extract.zip

With this script, you click a text box, and press the shortcut, which copies the text box's text to a text file. The shortcut is ` (grave accent). Press Ctrl + ` to indicate a new slide, press Alt + ` to enter notes (including e.g. estimated word counts of graphics), and press Ctrl + Shift + ` to exit the script.

(By the way, the self-extracted text's word count was almost identical as the PDF file's. However, we tested only one file, so I'm not sure if printing to PDF will always produce good results for counting words.)

Samuel

PS. We also tried CAT tools for word counting. Trados said "5000 words", so I guess it excludes the Notes. OmegaT and Wordfast Pro 3 and 5 all said "5250 words", so I guess they include the Notes, but add another 100 words from somewhere (well, there were 50 slides, so perhaps they include the slide count somehow?).


[Edited at 2020-03-11 21:21 GMT] ▲ Collapse
 


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Word counting in PowerPoint (and AutoIt script)






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