FREE - Word Services for most text documents

[Xairbusdriver]

One of our British Admins was looking for a way to count words in TextEdit. Unfortunately, his post was on the Community side, in a thread completely devoid of anything technical! The link below is one solution to his quest. However, I plan on lodging a complaint to the other Admins for the attempted high-jacking of the thread where the original request was posted! Rules simply must be respected, obeyed and enforced or there will be an archery... or something like that, anyway.

<Word Service>

Should work all the way back to 10.3(!). It still works in Mavericks (10.9.1). Just drag it into your ~/Library/Services directory. (Older OSes may need to place it in the Library/Services directory.

It shows up in your Services menu as an item labeled: "Statistics..." Just select some or all the text, right-(control)-click the selection and select the "Statistics..." item. You'll get a small window showing:

Characters
Spaces
Total of the two
Words
Lines

Click the "OK" button when you're tired of reading the statistics.

[Highmac]

QUOTE(Xairbusdriver @ Dec 23 2013, 10:11 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

One of our British Admins...

Thanks for being discreet, Jim, but I don't mind owning up. Wouldn't want one of the other British admins to get the blame

Anyway, thanks for the link.

Just for the record, the online wordcount service I mentioned in that other thread was Word-Count Tool. Probably as quick if you keep a bookmark for it. Just C&P into the window. And definitely - without any shadow of doubt - quicker than the method you suggested in the humour thread

[Xairbusdriver]

Ah! But what kind of "words" do you want to count? Do you count anything that has a space (or a hyphen) at the end (or a period or other punctuation)? Are there words that should not be counted (acronyms, conjunctions, etc.)? Do hyphenated words count as one 'word'? It gets tricky when you try to meet criteria established by that picky English teacher for your essay...

Apparently, Apple decided most people would not be using TextEdit while needing such technical data. I find it more emportint too have a spel chequer than a wurd cowntor. Of course, a grammar checker would be. Even more better!

[Johanbgoot]

Did as instructed; works fine.