Just give me the word count willya?

Give me a word count, and I can pretty much decide a lot of things:  time-to-complete-narrration, time-to-complete-editing, my cost, YOUR cost…a lot.

And you wouldn’t think it would be that hard to get the word count.  I mean, just about everybody uses MS Word in one form another, and all versions of Word do a fine job of providing a word count.

Ah, but what about a PowerPoint Presentation?  Power Point doesn’t do word counts.  You could export the text to Word, but even that doesn’t work for the project I’m working on.  The narration for this project comes from the presenter NOTES.  And extracting the NOTES out of a .ppt file to somehow get a word count was beyond me.

Luckily it was not beyond a couple of my colleagues, who gladly offered formulas, even macros to get the job done.  Maybe it’ll help you too.

Here’s Sherill Stewart’s Solution:

There is, unfortunately, not a terribly easy way to get the word count from the notes section in a PowerPoint presentation.  The one thing you may try this:

• Click the File tab, then click Save & Send.
• Under File Types, click Create Handouts, then under Create Handouts in Microsoft Word, click Create Handouts.
• In the Send to Microsoft Office Word dialog box
• click the page layout that says “notes below slides”
• It will then open in Microsoft® Word where you will then be able to use the much more robust WORD COUNT feature found in Word.
• NOTE: The word count will include the slide names, but if you do a little math, you should be able to easily subtract that particular word count.

Now, here’s Andrew Swingler’s solution:

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