March 2, 2010
I tried to set up Windows Explorer in Vista to show three relevant stats about my Word documents: the size (in KB), the word count and the number of pages.
While the first two seem to give the true figure, the number of pages is a completely random guess by Explorer. About two docs in every ten have the correct number of pages shown; all the others, no matter how long, are recorded as either 0 (that's just plain ridiculous!) or 1.
Is this yet another bug in what really should by now be a mature program? I have all the Vista service packs and updates installed.
August 7, 2011
I just checked this myself in Win7 and you are correct, there are discrepancies.
The only thing I can think of is you are using the old (.doc) format and I doubt that format has the ability to save the number of pages in the actual file. I opened up a few older documents and saved them with the new word 2007 (.docx) format and explorer reads the page numbers correctly.
March 2, 2010
Many thanks for your reply, sorry I've been offline for a while and only just caught up with it.
This really seems to be a totally illogical and random page count allocation by Vista:
I have new files which were generated in and saved as Word 2007 docx format which are listed as 1 page, regardless.
I have one particular nine year old file generated in and saved as Word 2000 doc format which is 330 pages long and this shows correctly!
As you did, I had also tried resaving old files in the new docx format - sometimes this corrects the page count, sometimes it doesn't.
Apparently this is a really poor effort by Microsoft in programming this particular "feature" of Vista. Sometimes you have to wonder what their 20,000 programmers sit around doing all day...
And you say this has carried forward to Windows 7 - unbelievable. I actually got a copy of Windows 7 at almost no cost, because I bought my new Vista computer just shortly before Windows 7 was launched. I haven't installed it as yet, and this just confirms my feeling that there is no need to.
August 7, 2011
I know my example is only one instance, but resaving the files worked for me on the limited number I tried. Doesn't look like you're experiencing the same results.
I wouldn't let that hold you back from upgrading to Windows 7. It's worth it, correct number of pages displayed or not!
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