How to Count Characters in MS Word. As one would expect, Microsoft Word includes a feature to count the words in a document; it also includes the ability to count the characters. Knowing the ...

Because non-printing characters reveal elements in your Word document that are usually hidden, such as spaces, line breaks, paragraph breaks, and tabs, they let you see its skeletal structure.

Long text at the right margin usually gets wrapped to the next line, leaving a gap. Word's optional break character offers a helpful workaround that lets you, not Word, control the break.