If you are working on an academic paper like I do, you may need to know if your word document meets a certain length requirements. There are three ways to count your document's word count.

To know the current word count of a document, open the document and right click on the status bar at the bottom of the Word 2010 window. The context menu which comes up will have an entry named “Word Count” which will tell you the current word count.

Click on “Word Count” and you can then have the count displayed in the status bar at all times.

word-count-statusbar