Characters, words and lines not counted by Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Office products ignore some document text when producing the document statistics available from Properties on the File menu of Office applications. This can mean Microsoft Office gives a significantly lower word and character count than is actually the case. Total Assistant does count the text Microsoft misses.  See below for details of the text Total Assistant counts that Microsoft ignores.

Microsoft Word

• Text boxes are often used and easily inserted from the Word Insert menu. However, the text contained in text boxes is not counted by Microsoft.
• Text in callouts or text added to autoshapes such as rectangles and arrows is ignored by Microsoft.
• Text in embedded Excel worksheets or other OLE objects.
• Text in header or footers and text in text boxes in headers and footers.
• Text in footnotes and endnotes.
• Text in grouped shapes.

Microsoft Word (HTML files)

• Various text is not included when opening an HTML document with Word, such as page Title.  In a test using 400 randomly selected HTML files, Total Assistant found 7.9% more words than Microsoft Word.  Particularly large errors occur with Word (over 50%) when the HTML file contains forms with option value tags.

Microsoft PowerPoint

• PowerPoint does not include the text contained in Word tables in the document statistics. Word tables can be inserted into a presentation by choosing 'Microsoft Word Table' from the Picture submenu on the Insert menu of PowerPoint.
• The text in embedded Word and Excel documents is also ignored by PowerPoint. Word documents may be embedded or linked into a presentation by choosing Object... on the Insert menu, or by copying text from Word to the clipboard and using 'Paste Special' in PowerPoint to paste in text as a Microsoft Word Document Object.