Character Count in MS Word

I’m writing an app in VB (not a macro) that will, among other things, count the characters in a Word (97 or 2000) document according to corporate specified parameters. These parameters are still being clarified, so I may need to adjust them and recompile for analysis. So far, it looks like the standard will be identical with what comes with Word (such as: returns are not counted while spaces are) except tabs should be counted as characters. How can this be done using the MS Word object in VB6?
Thank you