Libre Office Calc - word count
Thread poster: martewa
martewa
martewa
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Feb 6, 2013

Hi,
Is there a "word count" option in LibreOffice Calc version 3.5.4.2? I can't seem to find and think it doesn't exist, but maybe I'm blind.
Thanks,
Marta


 
John Holland
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France
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Workaround Feb 6, 2013

To my knowledge, there is no word count feature in Calc.

However, you can export your file to PDF and then count the words there.

Here's a command for that:

pdftotext filename.pdf - | tr -d '.' | wc -w

(substitute the name of your exported file for "filename.pdf")

OmegaT will give you a word count for an ODS file, also.


[Edited at 2013-02-06 23:44 GMT]


 
esperantisto
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Are you serious? Feb 7, 2013

John Holland wrote:

However, you can export your file to PDF…


Why this complicated workaround when you can simply export a file to tab-separated text and use any counting program?

[Edited at 2013-02-07 12:38 GMT]


 
John Holland
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Complexity is in the eye of the beholder Feb 7, 2013

esperantisto wrote:

John Holland wrote:

However, you can export your file to PDF…


Why this complicated workaround when you can simply export a file to tab-separated text and use any counting program?

[Edited at 2013-02-07 12:38 GMT]


Since I'm used to using the command line, my method seems less complicated to me than yours. Export to PDF from Calc is one click and the command is my counting program.

What counting program do you recommend? I'm happy to learn about more efficient approaches, and there's always more than one way to do things!


 
esperantisto
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None actually Feb 7, 2013

John Holland wrote:

What counting program do you recommend?


I use FineCount but this is because a couple of clients do. Thus no particular recommendation. As you’ve pointed, OmegaT produces stats of translated files, which I find satisfactory.

[Edited at 2013-02-07 13:34 GMT]


 
John Holland
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Alternatives Feb 7, 2013

esperantisto wrote:

I use FineCount but this is because a couple of clients do. Thus no particular recommendation. As you’ve pointed, OmegaT produces stats of translated files, which I find satisfactory.

[Edited at 2013-02-07 13:34 GMT]


FineCount is a Windows program, right? So it would involve using Wine on Linux, which may or may not be more complicated than running a command in a terminal.

The command I suggested is just an alternative to setting up an OmegaT project for a file (especially for those who are not users of OmegaT), if all that is needed is a quick word count.

But I really should have specified that I was thinking of Linux, where the command-line programs "tr" and "wc" are installed by default. The "pdftotext" program is part of something called "poppler-utils," which every desktop Linux user should have if they have a printer. So, for Linux users, the command shouldn't involve installing anything new.

[Edited at 2013-02-07 17:48 GMT]


 
martewa
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thanks Feb 7, 2013

Thanks for the answers,
I get by fine just by copying the file into gedit/pluma and counting there, was just wondering whether I could not find this option.


 
John Holland
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France
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gedit/pluma Feb 7, 2013

martewa wrote:

Thanks for the answers,
I get by fine just by copying the file into gedit/pluma and counting there, was just wondering whether I could not find this option.


Great! Definitely another good alternative.

I don't know why Calc doesn't have a word count feature... I've looked for it, too.


 
Samuel Murray
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Regarding exporting from Calc Feb 7, 2013

esperantisto wrote:
Why this complicated workaround when you can simply export a file to tab-separated text and use any counting program?


Does Calc export all worksheets in a single operation? Or would you have to export each worksheet of a 100-worksheet Calc file in a separate export operation?


 
esperantisto
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Easy Feb 8, 2013

John Holland wrote:

I don't know why Calc doesn't have a word count feature... I've looked for it, too.


That’s quite clear and logical: Calc is not a word processor, thus it does not count words.

"poppler-utils," which every desktop Linux user should have if they have a printer.


I don’t find such a package though I do have a printer.


 
esperantisto
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Calc export Feb 8, 2013

Samuel Murray wrote:

Does Calc export all worksheets in a single operation?


No, it does not.

Or would you have to export each worksheet of a 100-worksheet Calc file in a separate export operation?


Do you really translate 100-sheet Calc files (the topic starter definitely did not, as copying/pasting the contents to gedit sufficed) or this just to contradict?


 
Samuel Murray
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100 worksheets Feb 8, 2013

esperantisto wrote:
Do you really translate 100-sheet Calc files ... or this just to contradict?


Contradict, mostly. I did translate an Excel file with 20 worksheets recently, and each sheet had between 100 and 1000 words on it. Thank goodness for CAT tools. But I'm very lazy when it comes to repetitive tasks -- my tolerance level for such manual exports would have been 3 worksheets.


 
John Holland
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France
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poppler Feb 8, 2013

esperantisto wrote:

"poppler-utils," which every desktop Linux user should have if they have a printer.


I don’t find such a package though I do have a printer.


The major distros either have a poppler-utils package as a dependency of cups (Debian and derivatives, Fedora) or include the utilities in the popper package itself on which cups depends (Mageia, Arch).

OpenSuse seems to have it in the xpdf-tools package, which seems to be optional, so that's an exception.

I'd bet that poppler-utils (or whatever other package containing pdftotext) is optional on Slackware and Gentoo, etc., but users of those distros probably can figure out how to install what they need...


 


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Libre Office Calc - word count






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