How To Do Word Count in Mac Numbers

I rarely write an essay in Mac Numbers. But when I do, I want to know the word count. Sadly, Mac Numbers doesn’t have that feature. I don’t want to count the words with my fingers either.

Fortunately, there is a creative way to do word count in Mac Numbers by using the Numbers function COUNTMATCHES. The function cannot count the words. But it can count the white space between the words. Obviously the number of white spaces is the same as the number of words. The instruction on how to use the function is below. 

Mac Numbers function COUNTMATCHES needs to know two things in order to do the word count: the location of your essay and the pattern of the strings to count for. The location of your text is the cell that you put your text into. And you must use the function REGEX to express the pattern of the strings to count for.

The REGEX function looks like this: REGEX(“\S+”). When I don’t know the regular expression like most people, this function doesn’t make sense. Once I know, it is pretty simple. The “\S” means a white space in the computer language. The plus sign “+” means one or multiple continuous characters of the same kind. In this case, it means one or multiple continuous white spaces.

So now I put those two functions together to have a function that can count the number of words. 

In my example, the cell D4 contains my text. So I put D4 into the function COUNTMATCHES. But if you use the same function in your spreadsheet, you probably put your text in a different cell. Therefore, you must change this parameter. But don’t change the REGEX function.