Word 2011 error in character counts

[Arbor Friend]

Has anyone else had Word 2011 return character counts that are vastly different from those returned by Word on a Windows computer, or even the same edition of Word, but on another Mac? As an editor, the accuracy of word and character counts are important, because I base my bids and invoices on them. Over the past six months or so, I have had word and character counts that are wildly at odds with my colleagues, when they use Word's word counting feature using Word on their computers. We're talking 465,000 on my machine vs. 340,000 on other machines.
I have experimented and found that the word and character counts are accurate on a single line of text, but when I capture as few as a couple of paragraphs, Word returns these types of radically inaccurate results. It does not matter whether I am creating a new document (i.e., command N) and typing in new content, opening an existing document that I created, or one that was sent to me from someone who created the document in whatever hardware and software environment they use. It doesn't matter if the document contains metadata (e.g., footnotes, comments, indexes), text boxes, and graphics. The presence or absence of these does not change whether I get the correct word and character counts.
I have talked with other Word 2011 users, checked on all known forums (Microsoft Word, Apple, etc.), but have found no explanation, let alone solution to this. Any help someone might be able to offer would be greatly appreciated.



Computer is a MacBook Pro (mid-2009 model)
MacBook Pro 5,3
Running on an Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
System Version: OS X 10.10.5 (14F2009)
Word 2011: version 14.3.7 (130812)