Counting Words the Old Fashioned Way with WordBasic

You probably already knew that Word provides a way to determine the number of words in a selection or in your entire document. Word has its own internal algorithms to figure out the proper count. This is great, if you need to know actual word counts.

Before the days of actual word counts, however, typists figured out the number of average words in a document. This was done by figuring out the number of characters typed, and then dividing that figure by five. For some purposes you may still need to figure word counts using this old-fashioned approach. This can be done with a simple WordBasic macro, as follows:

Sub MAIN
    Title$ = "WordCount"
    On Error Goto HugeString
    InSelection = SelType()
    If InSelection = 2 Or InSelection = 6 Then
        WordCount = Int((Len(Selection$()) / 5) + 0.5)
        WordCount$ = Mid$(Str$(WordCount), 2) + " word"
        If WordCount > 1 Then WordCount$ = WordCount$ + "s"
        MsgBox WordCount$, Title$
    Else
        Beep
        MsgBox "No text selected", Title$, 16
    End If
    Goto Done

    HugeString:
        MsgBox "Selection too large", Title$, 48

    Done:
End Sub