Better Word Count

Description

This tool gives writers a live-updating sidebar as an alternative to the built-in word count utility. It also provides options to:

- include headers, footers, and footnotes (not possible with built-in word count)
- exclude particular header styles
- exclude strikethrough text
- view word count for selected text or the entire document

Notes:

- The built-in word count counts images, drawings, and other non-textual entities as single characters. We don't find this to make much sense for most use cases, so this tool only counts text elements. Because of this, there may occasionally be very small differences in character counts with the built-in tool.

- When no text is selected, and the entire document character count is being displayed, footnote markers within the text are counted as single characters, as they are in the built-in-word count. However, when a range is selected, they are ignored. This is a limitation due to the way footnotes are structured in the Google Docs API.

- We've had requests for a narrower sidebar. Unfortunately, Google Apps does not allow custom sidebars to customize their width, and all add-on sidebars are exactly 300px wide. We hope to see this changed in the future.