Default site description. Google Docs is a great, free text editor, and thanks to it being a part of the Google ecosystem, it's also great for collaborating easily with other Google users. However, when working in Google. The Docs to Markdown add-on lets people collaborate and edit a Google Doc, as usual, then convert the Doc to Markdown or HTML. With this approach, people do not need to know Markdown to edit. The conversion process does work a bit better when people properly apply paragraph and text styles in. Google docs login. Sign Google Docs with SignNow. Choose modern solution for your business and forget about uploading, downloading and saving your documents. Now you can esign Google Docs and send. Markdown is basically projected to become an alternative to HTML. Which mean, the use of Markdown documents supposed to be for web. Apparently, the use of Markdown is wider than it might expected.
Google Docs is an online word processor developed by—you guessed it—Google, with similar features to offline word processors such as Microsoft Word. Among one of the most used features in Google Docs is finding a page's word count and character count.
There are a lot of reasons you might want to find the word/character counts for a written work, including:
If you’re a student writing a five-page paper but you haven’t formatted your document yet, word count can tell you how close you are to being finished.
If you're a professional making a slide presentation and want to stay within a certain word limit- not too many to overwhelm the audience but enough to pass on the essential information.
If you're writing an essay for a job application that requires a minimum and maximum word count. Letters of recommendation and cover letters also follow a word count standard.
If you're committing to write a certain number of words per day. Famous authors often did the same; Ernest Hemingway = 500 / day, Barbara Kingsolver = 1,000 / day, Stephen King = 2,000 / day, Anne Rice = 3,000 / day.
Although not as feature rich as a desktop application, you can also create a Google Doc on your smartphone or tablet and edit documents on the go. Compose blog posts, text messages or Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat posts to publish later—paying close attention to the character count. In fact, social media is all about character count, making the word count feature (which includes character count) an important tool when composing things like article headlines, professional titles on LinkedIn, profile bios on Instagram, Twitter posts, SMS messages and more.
Using the Word Counter
Whatever your reason for needing to count the words in your Google Doc, here’s a breakdown of how to do it. Depending on whether you're using a Mac or PC, or desktop, tablet or smartphone, there are a couple of different ways to open the word counter.
On a desktop/laptop, you can open the Google Docs' word counter using either the mouse or a keyboard shortcut. First, your document needs to be in editing mode. If necessary, you can change to editing mode by going to the right side of the toolbar. There you'll find a drop-down box that indicates whether you're 'editing', 'suggesting', or 'viewing'. Select 'editing' if it’s not already selected. Please keep in mind that you can only select the editing mode on your own docs and those which you have been given permission to edit.
To open the word counter using a mouse:
Click on the tab at the top of the page titled Tools.
Find Word Count in the drop-down menu and click on it.
To open the word counter using a keyboard shortcut:
For PC users, press Ctrl+Shift+C
For Mac users, press Command+Shift+C
To open the word counter on an Android or iOS smartphone or tablet:
Tap the Apps icon on your home screen (Android only).
Tap the Docs icon.
Tap on a document title to open the document.
Tap the menu icon at the top right-hand corner of the screen.
Tap Word count.
Using any of these options a popup should open displaying the number of words, characters, and characters excluding spaces. On desktops and laptops there is also a fourth field that display the page count for the current document (unfortunately this feature is absent on smartphones and tablets).
Counting Words in Selected Text
You can also use the word counter feature to find out the number of words in a selected portion of text. Again, depending on your OS or device there may be different methods to finding the word count.
To select text on a desktop or laptop:
Highlight the text you want to get a word count for by left clicking the mouse and dragging the cursor. The text should appear inside a shaded box if you’ve selected it correctly. Release your mouse.
Click on the Tools tab at the top of the page and select Word count from the drop-down menu.
How To Use Markdown In Google Docs
The word count box will let you know:
Which page the selected text is on.
eg: 1 of 3 means it’s on the first page of a three-page document.How many words are in the selected text out of the total word count for the document.
eg: 90 of 300 means the selected text contains 90 words out of a document containing 300 total words.How many characters are in the selected text out of the total character count.
eg: 540 of 5283 means the selected text contains 540 characters out of a total 5283 character count.How many characters are in the selected text out of the total character count excluding spaces.
eg: 466 of 5283 means the selected text contains 560 characters out of a total 5283 character count excluding spaces.
To close the word counter box in Google Docs click on the “x” in the top right corner or click on the “Close” tab in the bottom left corner.
Social Media, Blog Posts, SMS and Email
As mentioned in the introduction, these platforms all rely more on character count which can be found listed in the word count feature on Google Docs. Many people like to compose their posts in Google Docs and then copy and paste them on social media or their blog or send in an email or a text when they’re finished editing. Here are some helpful character lengths to consider:
Facebook
By far the most generous of social media platforms, they allow for a total character length of 63,206. But the ideal status update length is actually only around 40 characters.Twitter
Allows for 140 character tweets while comments with a retweet get a limit of 116 characters.LinkedIn
Your Professional Headline has a 120 character limit while your Position Title has a limit of 100 characters.Instagram
Your Profile Bio allows for 150 characters.Blog Post
Ideal headline length is 70 characters while the ideal meta description length is 155 characters or less. The sweet spot for the actual post is somewhere around the 2,500 word mark.SMS
Text messages have a limit of 160 characters, though some services allow for character extensions of up to 1,000 characters.Email
40% of emails are first opened on mobile with that number expected to grow, therefore the recommended length of email subject lines is 50 characters or less.
Hope you've found these tips useful. Remember, you can always check your word count online with our easy to use tool. And if you enjoyed the article be sure to check out our sister post on how to use the word counter in Microsoft Word.
Professors across the country are scrambling to tidy up their syllabi. But how to best share them with students? I’ll be publishing my “Digital Storytelling and Social Media” syllabus on Github using a simple website publishing format called RMarkdown. The good news is, if you can type your syllabus into Google Docs, you can build a site like this:
The following tutorial walks you through how to convert a Google Doc into RMarkdown and then upload it to a Github repository and then host it live on Github Pages. Mine can be found here: aleszu.github.io/digisoc.
Export your Google Doc to Markdown
Markdown is simple syntax for documents. Headers look like this # Title and links like [click me](http://websi.te).
To convert your Google Doc into Markdown, copy this gdocs2md script from Github user Renato Mangini and insert it into your Google Doc’s script library by opening your Google Doc, navigating over to Tools -> Script editor… and then pasting the script into the Code.gs field like this:
Save the script as ConvertToMarkdown. It will ask you for permission to access your Google Docs and permission to send you an email. Next, run the script by clicking the triangular “play” button or selecting Run -> ConvertToMarkdown. The script will send you an email with a subject line that starts with [MARKDOWN_MAKER] followed by your document name.
Download the markdown file and open it in a text editor like Sublime Text.
Install R Studio and the rmarkdown package
Now that you have your syllabus – or document – in markdown, you can begin pasting it into RMarkdown files. Download and open R Studio and install the “rmarkdown” package by going to Tools -> Install Packages… and looking for rmarkdown. Alternatively, type install.packages(“rmarkdown”) into the Console and hit return.
Create website pages in R Studio
Next, create a file called index.Rmd by going to File -> New File -> R Markdown… and selecting HTML after putting in a title and author.
The top of your index.Rmd file must follow this format:
I’ve added the following:
To include a table of contents and spice up the site with nice typography using the cosmo theme, I’ve included some extra information including toc: true (meaning yes, I want a table of contents), toc_depth: 2 (meaning only # headlines and ## subheds will show up in the table of contents) and toc_float: true (meaning the table of contents will stay put as I scroll down).
Note: cosmo is cool. But you can play with themes and colors by consulting the RMarkdown HTML page. Below, some highlights:
Preview your index page
Using the Knit button or by clicking File -> Knit Document, you can preview your webpage in R Studio. Looking good!
Create additional pages
For my weekly schedule and assignments, I wanted to create additional pages. Open new .Rmd documents and paste in the corresponding markdown text. Save as schedule.Rmd and assignments.Rmd, for example. Make sure these pages have headers, too.
Creating the _site.yml file
RMarkdown websites require a _site.yml file to organize the rest of the files and add a navigation bar. In your text editor, create and save a _site.yml file following this format to name your website and include a navbar:
The output_dir: “.” is required if you want to host this website on Github pages. We do, so make sure to include it!
Notice the navbar. You can link to outside URLs or to the other pages you’ve built. Make sure to use .html. (In the next step, we’ll convert our pages from .Rmd to .html files).
Build your pages
Once you’ve finished editing your .Rmd files, you can build them into .html files. Make sure the .Rmd and .yml files are all in the same directory.
In R Studio, go to the Console pane in the bottom-left and type rmarkdown::render(“index.Rmd”) and click enter. Do the same for rmarkdown::render(“assignments.Rmd”) and rmarkdown::render(“schedule.Rmd”) or whatever you’ve named your other pages. The files should be processed by R Studio and end up in the same directory you’ve saved the .Rmd and .yml files. Open the .html files in an internet browser to double-check them.
Push the files to Github
Log into Github and create a new repository for your webpage. Make sure to initialize the repository with a README file.
Once you’re in your new repository, click Upload files:
Drag and drop in your files and click Commit changes:
Alternatively, you could use Github Desktop or the command line to commit files to your repository.
Add a .nojekyll file to repo
As the RMarkdown websites page explains, you must add a file named .nojekyll “to your site source code directory” because “this tells GitHub Pages to not process your site with the Jekyll engine.”
Next to Upload files, click Create new file. Name it .nojekyll and click Commit new file at the bottom of the page.
Publish your repo as a Github page
Finally, head to the Settings tab of your repository.
Scroll down to the Github Pages section and click None. Select master branch as your Source and then hit Save.
Now, navigate to {username}.github.io/{reponame} and your website should be live! Mine is at aleszu.github.io/digisoc/.
Happy coding!
Using Markdown In Google Docs
Update: Thanks Ryan Cordell for writing a script in R that “automates the rendering of HTML files from Rmd and automatically generates the page menu for the site, eliminating much duplicative work.”