WordCounter

Posted by Hugh
Jan 8, 2016 at 12:04 PM

A New Year has encouraged me to review my “productivity” tools, including WordCounter.

Not an outliner application of course, but potentially useful to those who use outliner applications on the Mac: WordCounter (http://wordcounterapp.com) developed by Christian Tietze, an occasional contributor to these forums. I’ve tried several such pieces of software (some with names similar to WordCounter, so beware confusion), and over several months I’ve found Christian’s to be the best. It sits in your menu-bar and tallies all the words that you type against the applications that you use to type them. A recent update also allowed it to tally the words in files that you list; it even records the daily totals of your typing in a calendar.

Incidentally, if you’re looking for an annual spreadsheet word-count record instead of or as well as Christian’s simple calendar, the Internet tends to offer quite a few Excel word-count templates for Windows and OS X of varying elegance and sophistication, not to mention weirdness, especially at this time of year (although be aware that the also quite numerous NaNoWriMo templates record no more than a month - unless you’re willing to modify them). One of the best of the 2016 crop that I’ve found so far is Jamie Raintree’s at http://jamieraintree.com/writing-revision-tracker. Hitherto, most word-count templates have been free-of-charge: Jamie’s charging $5, but I believe that the charge may be worthwhile paying if like me, you’ve limited or rusty Excel skills.