This talk is a complement to the colloquium. In it I will describe how a very good approximation to the distribution of the eigenvalues of the area operator can be obtained. This will not only work in the asymptotic limit of large areas but also all the way down to the smallest ones. Although the possibility of getting such an accurate description relies on some specific features of the area spectrum, the methods that I will explain may have a wider application to other counting problems in physics.