Sometimes you’re just not at your desk. An email comes in on your smartphone. You need to deal with it quickly as it doesn’t make sense to sit on enquiries and make people wait.

The script’s attached.

What do you do?

Do you load it up on your phone, read it to yourself and time it with your watch? Take an educated guess? Start going back to the enquirer requesting word counts etc?

Well, if any of the above sounds familiar, then you’ll probably love what I found yesterday!

I’d had an enquiry in, I was out of the office. No laptop with me, just my iPhone. The script was attached in PDF form, and the chap wanted a guide price so he could take it back to his client.

At least on the laptop you can click a button whether you use Word, Pages, Google Docs etc and get an instant word count.

Not quite as easy on a phone.

That’s until I had a brain wave to search the App Store for a ‘word count’ app. And lo and behold, there were some! And best of all, the one I downloaded, simply called ‘Word Count’, was free. (Even better, not even flooded with ads!)

I tried it – copied and pasted in the text from the attached PDF, clicked ‘done’, and there I had it – an instant word count. Prayers were answered!

I’ve just done a quick search, and it seems there are similar apps available for other devices, Android, Windows Phone and seemingly BlackBerry too.

So if you’d like to make your life that little bit easier, then I highly recommend a word count app for when you’re away from your desk and want to work out a quote quickly and easily. I’m glad I found one!

The app I downloaded.