Comments on: Excel Word Search Generator

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:57:00 +0000

This just makes the grid, you have to solve it yourself.

By: Linda, VP Games

Linda, VP Games — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 04:20:00 +0000

I don’t follow how this would work in Excel. How would the solution lines work, or does this just create the letter grid?

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 06:16:00 +0000

OK, I get it. I put a counter in there so that after 1,000 iterations, it would stop. You’re list of words is too long for a 27×27 grid and it quits after it can’t find space for them all. This is a good data point for the algorithm to determine optimum grid size. I wonder how that online place does it. Brute force would take too long.

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:33:00 +0000

Matthew: I can't think why some would be excluded. Do you mind sending me the list? dkusleika@gmail.com

Oh, I think I should clean the words of any non-alpha characters like hyphens, don't you think?

By: Matthew

Matthew — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:14:00 +0000

Replying to my own challenge – all you would need to do would be to store the initial cell and the direction and have these available in a dictionary or lookup table. Then you need a routine to highlight N cells given any starting cell and a direction.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:09:00 +0000

Fantastic - I will have great fun looking at your code!

I tried it out with a list of 95 Harry Potter names (max length 22, grid size = 22/0.8 = 27). The puzzle seemed to generate quite well but I noticed that while two of the names (Justrin-Finchley and You-Know-Who) contained hyphens there was only one hyphen in the grid. So not all the words are always included in the list and there is no indication of which words have been included and which not.

Which made me wonder how difficult it would be to enhance the code so that if you highlight any word in the list the corresponding entry in the grid is highlighted ...

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:48:00 +0000

I’m guessing he killed someone close to him to deserve that advice…

By: dcardno

dcardno — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:58:00 +0000

Doug – what has Jon ever done to you?

By: Doug Jenkins

Doug Jenkins — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:41:00 +0000

Jon – you’d better start using 2007 then

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:20:00 +0000

Doug -

#NAME?#NAME?#NAME?#NAME?#NAME?#NAME?

Oops! Forgot to install the ATP when I set up a new computer.