More and more people are using Coda as a writing surface, and much of what’s written today needs to fall into a specified word count. Not just tweets, but reports, articles, posts, intros, assignments, and more. To make this easier, we’ve added word counts, character counts, and doc statistics.
Word Count and Character Count
You can access your Word Count and Character Count through the Doc Settings panel:
Click the ‘Gear’ icon in the upper right corner of your doc
Select ‘Statistics’ from the Doc Settings menu
‘Word Count’ will show the total number of words in your doc and section; highlighting text will add a value to the Section Word Count so that it looks like ‘xx of yy words’ where yy = total number of words in the section, and xx = total number of words in the highlighted section
Clicking the down arrow next to ‘Word Count’ allows you to toggle to ‘Character Count’ to see the values for individual calendars; similar to Word Count, you may highlight an area to see the character count for that area
You can also see your Word Count or Character Count as you type! This can be helpful for crafting content with character or text limitsーanything from social media posts to essays!
Click the ‘Gear’ icon in the upper right corner of your doc
Select ‘Statistics’ from the Doc Settings menu
After selecting ‘Word Count’ or ‘Character Count,’ adjust the toggle for ‘Show while typing’ to ‘On’ to see your counts while you work!
Note: You can also use Command+Shift+C on a Mac or Control+Shift+C on a PC to see the floating word & character count. (This used to be the shortcut to add a checklist; that keyboard shortcut is now Command+Shift+9/Control+Shift+9)
Q: Which languages are supported for Word Count and Character Count?
A: Word count currently only applies to languages that use white spaces to separate words.
Q: Which words and characters, well . . . count?
A: The short answer is: Only text in a doc canvas contributes to doc and character counts. In other words, text in tables, views and formulas are not included in these counts. For word count, hyphenated words count as one word. Example: “word-of-mouth” would count as one word (and not three).
Nice feature @BenLee. Glad to see you guys focusing on the “Doc” aspect of Coda, not just data. Would love to see more around Docs (in the sense of Sections, not an entire Coda “Doc”), as I’ve been perhaps too vocal about here in the community, but will again plug shamelessly…
ability to add additional level of hierarchy of Doc Sections, like in more robust Wiki apps;
Lists of references to the Section across the whole Coda Doc when it’s @mentioned elsewhere - great for tech requirements, meetings, etc.;
some widget-type “blocks” which would be subsets of what you can do in a View, to allow more custom build-out of a Doc
Any chance that word/character counts for docs/sections will become accessible inside of formulas? That would unlock a ton of potential for our translation team.
Also interested in a formula for document statistics. We’re limited on the number of rows in a document to not break the API, and it’d be great to be able to reference that number easily to trigger notifications.
This is great, thanks! I’d echo what @ABp says, it would be great to see more of the “Doc” aspect. Hierarchical docs, where a table can be a table of docs (like Notion) would get my number one vote, and then better search to quickly retrieve those docs would closely follow.
Hey @Sam_Harrison, right back at you that’s a great point, search is in need of an upgrade probably. But knowing the Coda team, I’m sure they are iterating on it already! I think we are missing a basic “search results” type area that you might expect to see in other apps like Jira, Wrike, Asana, etc. with stuff like “filter by tasks for me” which would pull back stuff where you are assigned, etc.
Would be delightful to be able to use a wordcount() function in formulas, esp in tables, eg, for one column to give this measure of the length of another.
RegEx like this mostly works, Word Count - Word Processing Features - #3 by Murray_Adcock
but something direct would be nice
important function for cms-type use cases.
Tks!
I 100% agree with @j_p - I need the word count in table fields, not entire pages. The formula is a great stopgap (THANKS!), but would love for it to be built in.
