build a word search puzzle

[Biff]

Hi folks!

Anyone want to take a shot at this:

My mother LOVES to do word search puzzles.

Using Excel, I'm able to build the puzzle manually. Pretty
easy, no big deal. I manually plug the words into the grid
then I have a macro that fills the empty cells with random
letters.

I'm wondering if it's possible to have the words
automatically get plugged into the grid.

Say I have the list of words in a range, A1:A25. Then I
can run a macro to have the list of words randomly placed
into the grid.

Each word gets broken down so that 1 letter is in 1 cell
and of course the entire word must be in consecutive cells
in one of the below patterns.

The patterns can vary as some might know that are familiar
with word search puzzles.

The patterns can be:

horizontal left to right
horizontal right to left
vertical top to bottom
vertical bottom to top
diagonal top to bottom
diagonal bottom to top

I know this asking for a lot and is a tough one to do, but
if someone is willing to give it a go I'd really
appreciate it.

Thanks
Biff

 

[JulieD]

Hi Biff

just incase you're interested you can download a really good wordsearch game
where you can add your own words etc from
http://www.bigfishgames.com/downloads/search/indexGws.html

(there's proabably others but i like this one) ... it only gives you 1 hour
of use with the demo version (fully functional - as far as i can tell) but
that's plenty of time to create and print a number of games (also comes with
heaps supplied).

Cheers
JulieD

 

[Paul B]

Biff, this is alsp not for excel, but this site has a lot of puzzles you can
make
http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/


--
Paul B
Always backup your data before trying something new
Please post any response to the newsgroups so others can benefit from it
Feedback on answers is always appreciated!
Using Excel 2002 & 2003

 

[Biff]

Thanks, Julie and Paul!

I've searched the net several times and have looked at
just about everything that's out there.

I realize that my request is very difficult and isn't
something you just whip up in 15 minutes but I figured
someone just might like the challenge. It's way beyond my
skills!

Biff