Here’s how to check your word count in Google Docs on both desktop and smartphones.

Google Docs on desktop offers both a menu item and a keyboard shortcut to let you see the word count.

Here’s how you use both of these methods in your document. We’ll show you how to find the word count for your entire document and for a particular selection.

If you want to find the number of words for your entire document, you can do it with just a couple of clicks in Google Docs.

Launch your document in Google Docs on the web. Click the Tools menu at the top and select Word count. Alternatively, press Ctrl + Shift + C in Windows or Command + Shift + C in macOS. A window appears showing you the word count for your document. It tells you the total number of words, pages, and characters. Click OK to close the box.

If you want to find the word count for a paragraph, a sentence, or any other selected text in Google Docs, just follow the same method.

Select the text you want to find the word count for using your mouse or keyboard selection keys. Click the Tools menu at the top and select Word count. The window that appears now says X of Y words, where X is the number of words for your selected text and Y is the total number of words in your document.

Google Docs offers a real-time word counter to add to your document editing screen. With this tracker enabled, you don’t need to open the Tools menu each time you want to see the word count.

Here’s how to activate the on-screen word counter in Google Docs:

Select the Tools menu at the top and click Word count. Tick the Display word count while typing box. Your Google Docs word count appears in the lower-left corner.

Bear in mind that the word count only appears in this document. You need to enable it for each other document that you create or edit.

Google Docs for Android and iOS also offers a word count feature. You can access this feature just as easily as you can on a desktop browser.

Open your document in the Google Docs app. Tap the Three Dots (. . . ) at the top-right corner and select Word count. You should see the word count for your entire document. 2 Images Close

Select the text you want to find the word count for. Tap the Three Dots (. . . ) at the upper-right corner and choose Word count. It says X of Y, where X is the number of words you’ve selected and Y is the total number of words in your document.

Google Sheets and Google Slides don’t offer a word count feature. However, there are workarounds that let you find the word count for these online apps.

In Google Sheets, you need to use the following formula to count the words in your selected cells. This should work just as well as the official word counter in Google Docs.

For Google Slides, there’s currently no method except for copying the content from your slides and pasting it back into Google Docs to use the word count feature there.

For other types of documents, there are usually plenty of free word count tools available online.

Whatever document it is you’re working on, if you need to keep track of your words, Google Docs’ word counter is an extremely useful tool for you. It eliminates the need to find and install a third-party extension.

As if Google Docs doesn’t have built-in features already, there are also lots of add-ons you can install to further extend its capabilities. These extensions usually fill any other gaps that Docs is yet to bridge.