Yup, that’s right… how do you do a word count in Word? Well, the simple answer is Alt-T, W and particularly for the ribbon-challenged like me who prefer the keyboard. But what happens if you are working to a specific word count, have ancillary information in the file but only want the content word count? Well, that’s a little more tricky and requires some lateral thinking (or some DuckDuckGoing).
And the (or one) solution is to put your ancillary information in a different style, change the font attributes to include “hidden” for that style, but then in the Word options make sure “print hidden text is selected”. That way you can see it and print it - crucially though Word excludes hidden text from word counts.
