Best way to Count WPM

[xmetal2001]

What would be the best way to count words per minute that someone types?

[PaulLewis]

If you define the terms "word" and "minute" to your own satisfaction then I think your answer will be there.

If you wish to write a program to test a user's typing speed then you should have no trouble at all.

On the other hand, if you plan to write code that monitors a users typing speed on all apps that they might use, then this is trickier and will need some thought.

Which do you plan to do?

Regards
Paul Lewis

[xmetal2001]

Just plan to test typing speed in my program...

[Jop]

Let them type a string, like the alphabet"

And then use this:
[code]
'When the user starts typin
begtime = Timer

'When ending
endtime = Timer

Time = endtime - begtime / Len(Text1)
MsgBox Time & " miliseconds p/character"
'you could do your own calculations for char/min or sec
'If you need any help I'll look up a sample prog I made.

[PaulLewis]

Jop's suggestion is fair enough, however there is a big difference between words per minute and characters per second.

Since you are writing your own program to test speed, I would imagine you will need a few resources such as various paragraphs to test against. What I mean is, you will probably get the best overall result if you have hard copies of newspaper or magazine articles, company prospectus or annual reports, excerpts from books (non-fiction and fiction) - that sort of thing.

If you just throw a random selection of words onto the screen to test the user, then your results will be a little bit skewed since in the real world, typists generally don't type from something on the screen.

But which ever method you use, it is quite simple to use VB to test speed. If you use the paragraph system, then you don't need to do any counting until the end of the test (after the user has indicated they have finished).

If you want to test on a word by word basis, then you will need to use something like the Keypress event in VB to monitor progress.

in each Keypress event for the text box you would update your wpm speed counter each time a space (or enter or a few other keys perhaps) was pressed.

Perhaps you were looking for more direct examples of this though? If so, please advise.

Regards
Paul Lewis

a word is counted as 5 characters

this is a standard in typing tests
that are given.

[PaulLewis]

That seems fair though. Do you know how the test is measured in that case?

Is a space counted as one of the characters ?


Paul

the tests i have taken were each very similiar

one page tests with double spaced lines containing
two paragraphs.

at the end of each line there was a count of the *words*
that the line contained. i am assuming that spaces were
not counted, but i could be wrong.

if you reached the end of the page you were required to
start at the top again and keep repeating until the five
minutes were up...yes, five minutes.

at that time the lines typed were totaled and divided by
five to arrive at the words per minute..

hope that helps you out some..