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Drag it onto the Wordrange window, or choose File › Add Documents… (⌘O). The count appears straight away, for the whole document. Untick the parts your word limit leaves out; Wordrange remembers your choice for next time.

To see how it works first, choose Help › Count the Sample Manuscript.

PDF, Word (.docx and .doc), Markdown, LaTeX (.tex), RTF, OpenDocument (.odt), HTML, EPUB and plain text.

Click Copy next to the number, or press ⇧⌘C. You get the number with what it includes, for example “7,948 words (main text and notes)”, ready for a cover letter.

It follows Word’s rules, which are what journals and universities go by. A word is anything between spaces that has a letter or a digit in it. “Well-known” and “and/or” are one word each; “1990–2000” and “this—that” are two, because a dash between words separates them; a dash or an ampersand standing alone isn’t a word. Each Chinese or Japanese character counts as a word.

Usually because Word counts different parts. Word counts the whole document, including the title page, abstract, references and appendices, and footnotes only if Include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes is ticked. Tick the same parts in Wordrange and the counts should agree closely.

Yes: characters with and without spaces, for the parts you’ve ticked, are shown below the number.

Control-click or right-click it in the text below the parts and choose Count As, then the right part. The count changes at once. To see only what was counted in one part, choose it from the Show menu above the text.

Whatever your journal’s or university’s instructions say. “Including notes, excluding references” is main text and notes. “Everything except the abstract and references” adds tables, appendices and statements. If the instructions say “all inclusive”, tick every part.

Wordrange reads the page layout: it leaves out running heads, page numbers and line numbers, joins words hyphenated at the end of a line, reads two-column pages in order, and takes the smaller type at the foot of a page as footnotes. A PDF made from Word or LaTeX (Save as PDF) gives the most exact count.

A table in a PDF is counted with the text around it, and words inside a chart drawn into the PDF count as text. Look through the text list for these and move them with Count As if your limit leaves tables out.

Pages without text are read with the Mac’s built-in text recognition, on your Mac. The count of a scanned page may be off by a few words.

A Pages document can’t be read: in Pages, choose File › Export To › PDF or Word, and count that file. A password-protected PDF can’t be read either; remove the password first. Wordrange can read only the files you choose (a Mac App Store rule), so choose the original file, not an alias to it.

Yes. Drop the folder on the window and every document in it is counted, each in the list with its count. File › Export Counts as Spreadsheet (⇧⌘E) saves all of them, part by part, as a CSV file for Numbers or Excel.

No. It only reads them.

If you downloaded it from this website, choose Help › Check for Updates…: it opens the download page, where the version number of the latest release is shown. Download it and drag it into Applications, replacing the old copy. Wordrange doesn’t check for updates by itself, because it never connects to the internet. From the Mac App Store, updates arrive like any other app’s.