Hi artgeek,
Actually the widget also counts “hidden” characters like html code, that’s wy 50 characters sometime shows just 5-10…
I’ll update the plugin to force count just showed characters. Meanwhile you can put a extra big quantity to force “show all” like 5000…
mz-page-excerpt.php code is actually inside the main file and this file is there for next updates in order to move code there. You will have no problem with this.