Consider a new document. The operator types "Hello" on line 1 and then presses the Enter key and types "?" on line 2 so the document looks like this:
Hello
?
How many characters does the document contain? Easy, just use the Count property of the text box. For example:
MsgBox ActiveDocument.Text.Count
displays the answer 7 (that is, 5 for hello + 1 for the question mark + 1 for the Enter key). Note that ActiveDocument is needed before the Text object can be referenced. It doesn't need to be the current document - any document object will do.