Choose a new character scale. Word's default is 100%/normal, so increasing the scale will make your letters scale further apart with more white space between each character.

Word already displays the number of words in a document in its status bar for all versions. This number appears at the bottom, second to the right after the number of pages in the document. If you ...

How to get a character count in Word with one click. You can add Word Count to Word's Quick Access toolbar — that's the row of icons at the top left of the title bar.

The responses show the number of lines (1), words (3) and characters (13 counting the newline). If you want to get the same information for a file, pipe the file to the wc command as shown below.