Microsoft alternative

[WheelyFixed]

As I recall, there have been two methods of doing word count - one where they actually counted the words by looking for space separated groups of characters, and the other by counting the characters and dividing by some number (memory says it was either 5 or 8, but I'm not sure) that was supposed to represent the 'average word length'.... I think older software tended to use the count and divide method because it was easier / less resource intensive, while newer software uses the newer method because it's more accurate. I'm wondering if what you were seeing was the effect of toggling between the two methods, possibly triggered by the change...

I'd also add that modern Libre Office is supposed to be able to open / read / write ANY of the MS Office standards, with the exception of some Excel macros... A while back the L.O. / O.O folks got the Open Document (.odf / ,odt etc.) format approved and adopted by ISO as a standard... Microsoft then apparently pulled some shady shenanigans and despite ISO rules that say only one format for a given type of document is supposed to be adopted, got their format adopted as well (Isn't it good to have multiple standards to choose from?) But that required them to actually publish a lot of their formatting specs that used to be proprietary, allowing other software to develop the ability to handle MS Office documents.

WheelyFixed