hello, a very simple one here:

in MSWord, you can go to tools>word count (i think) and it will give you the word count of either the whole document or the part of it which you have selected. In Openoffice and Staroffice, it looks like the equivelant is to go to file>statistics which will give me the word count in the whole document but NOT a selection i might make. This isn't useful since often i need to know how many words a document has not including the references or something like that.

Is it possible in OOo or staroffice to count the words in the current selection? at the moment i have to save, then reopen it in KWord and do a count from there

thanks in advance...

i seem to recall that that info is in File | Statistics or somethign in the file menu.

well, as i say, the info is indeed in file>statistics (well it's files>properties>statistics in the version i am using right this minute), however this info shows the totals for the entire document.
What i really want to know is how to get it to display counts for parts of the document. so say i have an eight page document, and i select all of pages one to five except the first two paragraphs of page one, i would like to be able to perform some command or go to some menu antry that will count the words/paragraphs etc of only my selection, not the whole document.

i find it difficult to believe that this feature does not exist in OOo or staroffice, since they are otherwise huge and full featured programs. I don't use many features of a wordprocessor, but this is one of them. kword and abiword have this but of course they do not have all that fantastic support for all the file formats that OOo does (including staroffice and msword formats).

IN ooo documentation, there is nothing about counting a selection of words, just the whole document. I guess you could either:
Count words as you go and record it, or
write your "sections in different windows and then paste them together for your final draft. Kind of tedious but better then having to use kword.

i thought that it would show a selection *IF* there was a selection, and the full count if not.

I just tried it. I opened a document and highlighted a paragraph and went to the word count and it was the same as the entire doc.

yup, and it's been that way as long as i can remember too, so unless anybody knows if there's another way to do a partial word count i suppose i will have to accept that it's not possible which seems ridiculous to me considering how advanced this app is.

so am i to take it that this really is a feature that both OpenOffice.org and StarOffice do not have? this seems pretty ridiculous to me, i will have to write to those concerned with these programs and find out why this oversight!

Use their bugzilla to report problems like this. I can assure you it's been reported before, but OO have a comparitevly slow release cycle.