Equivalent of words in signs

Hello everyone,

My question, which may seem quite naive to you, concerns Word for Mac. I will need to write texts with a specified number of characters. So unless I have fun counting spaces, letters, periods, and commas or averaging the number of words, is there a way to find out the number of characters in a document?

Thank you in advance for your help!!! Hope to see you soon.

Lisa

Configuration: mac OS X panther