• Word Service Report Template

World Service Authority, World Office, 5 Thomas Circle, NW Washington, D.C. Tel: (202) 638-2662; Fax: (202) 638-0638; Email: info@worldservice.org.

• Public: WordService(System::String ^ name, Microsoft::SharePoint::Administration::SPFarm ^ farm); public WordService (string name, Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.
• Add useful word processing functions to any Mac app including DEVONthink with the free WordService and CalcService. Writers Using DEVONthink. Steven Berlin Johnson, US bestseller author and New York Times writer, uses DEVONthink for collecting and organizing text snippets, notes, and quotations. He wrote about it in the essay Tool for Thought.

Interesting...I just wrote this Applescript last week (I keep it in my Scripts menu). It might come in handy for someone who doesn't want the full functionality of WordService. I suppose it could count spaces if modified to use Applescript's text delimiters.
set myclip to the clipboard as string
set the reportnum to the count of words in myclip
display dialog 'The clipboard contains ' & reportnum & ' words.'

Be cautious with WordService... I tried many versions and many times to use it and it would often appear as the root of unexplainable crashes and instability when it was active. Disable it and all was well again. Sure would like to use it - just too buggy for my taste.

another 10/10 review. Seriously, is this a 10 star piece of software? has anything ever gotten an 8 here?

Last week was an 8, as a matter of fact. And keep in mind these are 'Picks of the Week.' There are occasionally 7s as well, though I'm not sure I've given a 6.
Keep in ming that these are all apps that I personally like and find useful, hence they start with a high score already. If they didn't, they wouldn't be here. This is *not* a software review, merely a pointer to an interesting piece of software.
My criteria for a 10 is pretty simple for a PotW: No glaring bugs, no glaring omissions, it must be priced right with its competition, and it pretty much does what it claims to do. I don't mark down for features not included, unless they fall into the glaring omissions category (Pages and page management, for instance :) ). If it meets those criteria, and isn't insanely ugly, it'll probably get a 10.
-rob.

It is also too bad that it won't work in Word. In fact, I can't get ANY of my text-related services to work in Word. Anyone know why??

At least v.X isn't. Not sure about Word 2004. My understanding is that Services--that is, things you find under the Services submenu under an applications name menu, e.g. Word--are only available to applications programmed in the Cocoa language.
--Books

Yep - I'm running 2004 and it still isn't Cocoa. Lousy Microsoft.

They're also available in Carbon apps *if* the developer has chosen to add support for them. For example, Entourage 2004 supports Services even though Word 2004 does not.

Even on Windows there are a whole whack of inconsistencies between the various office applications. I wish Pages was a little less Quark-like and was more the half-way between BBEdit and Quark.

I have been using WordServices since, well forever... I use it a lot! Especially the Reformat option to get the enters out of text.
Technically also Carbon apps could use it, if they would incorporate the right API. MS hasn't done this and therefor you can't get Service to work with it.
I have only good experiences with this software. I've never had any crash related to this software.
It's not a 10/10, but 7/10 in my eyes. There is some room for improvement I think. (though some issues are related to bugs in OS X)

See above for my take on what makes a PotW a '10.' I really don't count down for features not included unless said feature is notable in my daily use. Since WS does what I need it to do, I haven't noticed any glaring missing features. It hasn't crashed, and it's free. Hence the 10.
10s here are not nearly as hard to earn as a 5-mouse rating in Macworld, primarily because (a) this is software I already like, and (b) these aren't full nitpick-every-detail reviews. They're meant to be informative pointers to potentially useful apps, and that's about it.
But that's the beauty of rating systems; many of them, including this one, are highly subjective :).
-rob.

From what I've read elsewhere, iWord <i>can</i> count words, its just not on the top menu, but buried further down. I can't help you with where, but at least you know to look! But nice hint all the same.

Pages *can* count words. It cannot count words in a selection. I've looked, read the manual, taken the user's tour, tried every menu selection with and without a selection active ... if it's in there, I have no clue where it's hiding.
The overall count is in the Document tab of the inspector, on the Info tab of that tab (if that makes sense :)). It gives you all sorts of counting stats, but they are for the entire document. This is the only word count option mentioned in the manual.
Until someone proves me wrong, I don't see any way to count words in Pages unless you want the count in the total document. I've probably spent a good three hours looking for it, scattered over my time with the program.
-rob.

3 hours looking for a selection word count? You should get out more.
:-)

Hehe ... I was involved anyway, doing the writeup for Macworld. So off and on, I went digging. It seems so ... obvious. But no, not there, near as I can tell.
-rob.

To get a Word count in Pages select the 'document inspector' and then select the 'info' tab.

Please read the comments -- you cannot get a word count for a *selection*, only for the entire document.
-rob.

Interestingly enough, I was coming to the site to look for info on Services. Was installing Devon's Services Pack (including WordService).
Have been using WordService for a long time and it has proved extremely useful. In fact, Services are among the coolest features in Mac OS X, IMHO. The word count/statistics, though not live, can be a huge help. And Nisus Thesaurus provides a service for lookup or replace. Really neat. Not to mention CalcService, also part of DevonTech's Services Pack: select an equation, and the service solves it directly.
Other apps offer Services, including some reference management software (BibDesk, Endnote), some with auto-completion!
Is there a good repository for Services? Or just a guide to OSX Services in general?
Thanks!

The AppleCore Project Web Services are another great option with 200+ services:
http://rixstep.com/4/0/aws/

Once you know the basics about services, OS X’s underused shortcuts, your next question is inevitably: Where can I find more? You can add—and even create—your own services. Here are four of the best:

1. DevonTechnologies’ WordService

You can find some third-party services if you look around. DevonTechnologies’ free WordService is actually a bundle of services that allow you to perform actions on selected text. This set of services is for you if you ever find that you need to reformat text copied from an email, remove line breaks, change text in ALL CAPITALS to normal case, or Capitalize Every Word In A Text without having to manually alter your texts.

2. DevonTechnologies’ CalcService

CalcService, also available free from DevonTechnologies, provides calculation functions from within any application that handles services. With this set of services, you can type a formula in a text document and then use one of the services to perform the calculation. Also use the services to either display the result or add it to your document (replacing the formula, or appending the result to the formula). I’m not a math geek, but anything that can take a formula like bs(sin(sqrt(2)))*sign(cos(pi*pi)) and give me an answer (it’s -0.987765945993 if you’re curious) is pretty nifty.

3. MacAutomation’s Finder services

The MacAutomation website offers a number of free services, including some that encode music files and others that work with Apple’s iPhoto, Mail, Safari, Terminal, the OS X Finder, and more. One of my favorites is Disk Item • New Disk Image with Selection, which is part of the site’s Finder Services bundle. This service creates a new disk image file (.dmg) containing the selected Finder items. If you send or archive files in disk images, this service can save a lot of time. The other services included in this bundle are Disk Item • Rename Selected Items and Disk Item • Set Spotlight Comments.

4. Your own custom-made services

Launch Automator, and, in the Choose a Type for Your Document pane, click on Service, then click Choose. At the top of the window, in the menu following Service Receives Selected, choose PDF Files. Next, click on PDFs in the Library column of Automator, then in the second column, click on Extract PDF Text and drag that to the right-hand section of the Automator window.

Press Command-S to save the service, and, in the dialog box that displays, give it a name, such as PDF to Text. Click on Save.

Check to make sure it’s working. Find a PDF file in the Finder, right-click on it, and choose the Services sub-menu from the contextual menu that displays. You should see your service listed there. Also choose Finder -> Services, and check to make sure it shows up in the menu there. You should see it in both places.

Notice that if you select a file that isn’t a PDF, the service won’t show up; that’s because you specified, in the beginning, that the service would only work with PDF files.

Word Service Report Template

Senior contributor Kirk McElhearn writes about more than just Macs on his blog Kirkville. Twitter: @mcelhearn Kirk is the author of Take Control of Scrivener 2.