Difference in Word Counts between Microsoft Word and Open Office

Recently, I was alerted to cases where word counts, often used as assignment benchmark, produced by Microsoft Word and Open Office appear to differ when analysing the same document.

How much do they differ or is there trend? To understand this phenomenon, a number of Word documents are used; some have extensive diagrams while another is a pure text produced from a very large document containing diagrams, tables etc.

Here are the results:
There does not appear to be any trend from these data samples and hence more investigations are required.

It is interesting and educator relying on the Word Count may have to be aware of this issue as more and more students are using Open Office.