I am using Office 2010 and have a problem with regards to character counts.

As part of my job I have to fill in tenders and PQQs which usually have a specific chearacter count for an answer to any particular question. Normally this isnt a problem in that if the character count says I am allowed 3000 characters, I find that if I do an answer that that is around the 2900 character mark it fits into the answer box ok.

Today however I recieved a tender which said I had 3000 characters in which to answer the question and when i pasted my 2890 character answer in there was still quite a bit of text missing. When I did a character count on the text that actually fitted into the text box it came up at approximately 2310 which makes answering the question nigh on impossible.

Although the document was protected I was able to overide the protection and checked the text box properties which did indeed specify 3000 characters. Now the simple answer would be to change the value but I dont want to get caught on doing this as technically it is not allowed. Bear in mind this has only happened in two occaision in the past soits not a normal occurence.

So what is the cause of this and more improtantly what is the answer.
I am using Arial 12 (as this is specified in the tender documents).

Any help greatly appreciated.