Excel Word Search Pro is the ultimate word search generator for Microsoft Excel that allows to fully customize word search puzzles to create amazing KDP puzzle books. Word Search Pro for Excel creates puzzles of any size for themes of words and alphabet in any given language. Puzzles and solutions can be formatted as wished, solution answers being highlighted in bold, circled, or shadowed in any color or multi-color. Word Search Pro for Excel allows to save each puzzle as picture and export directly to Microsoft Word to easily create your KDP puzzle book.
Key Features
Word Search Pro for Excel counts with the
following key features:
- Creates word search puzzles of any size (up to 99x99) with as many words as possible fit
- Allows to choose whether to place words in diagonal direction, in backwards direction (reverse reading), and whether to allow words crossing
- Allows to apply any available formatting in Excel to puzzle, tittle, and legend
- Allows to format the font of the solution and whether to highlight keywords with bold letters, circle words, or apply shadow/fill in any color or multi-color
- Allows to easily add and update themes and words in English or other language and update/change the alphabet to create word search puzzles in any language
- Allows to save puzzle and solution as picture or export to Microsoft Word
Word Search Ribbon
All the functionality of Word Search Pro for
Excel is available through a tab in the ribbon along the standard tabs of
Microsoft Excel. The tab “Word Search” is organized in four different groups
including buttons for each of the functions as indicated below:
- Puzzle includes buttons to create a puzzle and launch the dialogs for puzzle options, solution options, and legend options
- Themes includes buttons to add a new theme, update an existing theme, explore all themes, and reset the list of letters to match the English alphabet
- Export includes buttons to launch the export options dialog and to save the puzzle as a picture or export it to Microsoft Word
- Help includes links to this blog info page, and to report a bug, seek technical assistance, or simply share feedback about Word Search Pro for Excel
Create Puzzle
Word Search Pro for Excel shows the below dialog
when choosing to create a puzzle. The various properties and settings are
always saved when creating each puzzle to make the process quicker.
We must select a theme, the target number of
words, and the size of the grid in order to create a puzzle. We can select a
theme from all the available themes in sheet “Themes” simply using the
drop-down. The number of words available for the selected theme appears next to
the theme. There are two buttons to launch the dialogs to add a new theme or update
a theme directly from there.
The target number of words is selected from the
drop-down below. There are as many options as words available in the selected
theme. Another drop-down allows to select the method of adding words from a
theme while generating the word search puzzle. There are three possibilities:
- Randomly: selects and adds theme words randomly
- Top-to-bottom: adds words starting from the top row and downwards, one after another. If a word cannot be placed for any reason (for example if it’s too long for the selected grid size), it continues with the next word. The list of words for initial theme examples is sorted alphabetically. In such case, this option place them in alphabetical order.
- Longest-to-shortest: adds words from the longest length or number of characters (letters) to the shortest. This option may enhance words packing compared to the other options depending on the grid size and variability of word lengths.
By default, words are added in horizontal and
vertical position, reading from left to right and top to bottom respectively.
Additionally, we can choose to also place words in diagonal direction, in
backwards direction (reverse reading), and whether to allow words to cross and
share letters. See an example for each option below.
Finally, and most importantly, we need to
specify the size of the grid by setting the number of columns and rows from 2
to 99, although it probably does not make any sense to have a puzzle of 2 or 3
columns/rows only, or having one with as many as 90 or even 80, 70, etc.
The last check box determines whether to export the puzzle right away or not. The puzzle can also be exported later using the buttons to save as picture and/or export to Word in the ribbon. In any case, the export settings specified in export options will apply (see later).
Puzzle Options
While the previous dialog includes settings used
during the process of generating the puzzle, this other dialog allows to set various
formatting properties of the grid and puzzle appearance. Among these, we can
specify the size of the canvas, the font family, size, and color of the letters
in the word search puzzle, and the thickness and color of the border around the
puzzle. On top of that, we can also apply any other formatting available in Excel.
The size of the canvas refers to the size of
each cell in the worksheet. More specifically, the value used for size
corresponds to the column width in the sheet. When changed, the row height is
also updated to preserve the proportions of squared cells. That applies to all
except the top row, so that we can keep the size of the puzzle tittle. We
recommend keeping a canvas size of 4 unless working with either much larger
monitors and/or screen resolutions, or smaller such as tablets or phones.
The font family, size, and color specified in
this dialog will be apply when creating each puzzle. Applying a font family (or
size) manually that is not available in the dialog can be done but won’t be
saved though. Other formatting available in Excel can also be applied and will
most likely be carried forward to the following puzzles (depending on which
property). Similarly, the thickness and color of the border around the puzzle
can be specified and saved through this dialog. The formatting of the tittle
(top row) is done manually and accepts any font formatting available or
changing the row height. We do not recommend applying borders or interior color
to the tittle.
Note that the puzzle options dialog allows to
apply settings instantly to see how the puzzle appearance changes. However,
changes need to be saved to remain. Cancelling without saving will revert the
previous formatting.
Solution Options
This dialog allows to specify the font family,
size, and color of the text in the solution. We recommend keeping the same font
family and font color used for the main puzzle (usually, black and white). We
also recommend keeping a size relative to the one used in the main puzzle. It
is important to emphasized that the solution always uses a canvas size of 2.
Therefore, the font size for the solution should be smaller than that of the
main puzzle if using the default canvas (size 4).
We can also specify the way to highlight the
solution answers or keywords using one or various of the following options:
- Bold font
- Circle or line around the word
- Shadow or fill around the word
We can also set the color of the line and fill,
or whether to use the multi-color palette (a different color for each word). The
line has a weight of 1 point and the shadow fill has a transparency of 75%. Furthermore,
we can change the palette of colors by updating the RGB values for each of them
in sheet “Colors”. Please note that once changed you cannot get default colors
back (but they repeat after row 21). See below examples of the different solution
options.
Legend Options
The legend includes the list of words to be
found in the word search puzzle. We can specify the position and format of the
legend or not showing the legend at all.
We can choose to place the legend vertically
next to the puzzle or horizontally at the bottom. Additionally, we can choose
to centre the words or keep them aligned to the left. It seems they fit better
aligned to the left for vertical legends while centred for horizontal
placement. When placed vertically, we can also choose to update the separation
between words to fit the entire height of the puzzle. And we can also specify
whether to sort the list of words alphabetically (A to Z) or keep the order
they were initially added (depending on the way words were added explained
earlier).
Example of word search puzzle with vertical legend on the side
We can also specify the font family, size, and color of the list of words in the legend, and whether to have a border around them or not.
Themes and Alphabet
There are 10 theme examples available in sheet
“Themes”. We can add new themes and words or update existing themes either
directly on the worksheet or via the respective dialogs available in the ribbon.
Using the dialog allows to quickly copy/paste a list of words. But words can
also be simply added manually there too. Either way, words need to be separated
by a new feed/line, a semi-colon, a comma, or a space. It must be one of those
options alone, it cannot be a combination of them. When copy/pasting a list of
words from the web or other source, they should already have a line separator. The
space may be the quickest option when typing the words manually. However, when
updating a theme, words can only be separated by a line feed, as that’s the way
they are shown in the text box when retrieved from the theme column. Another
advantage of using the dialogs to add or update themes is that we can choose to
automatically save words in upper case and/or sort them alphabetically.
Word Search Pro for Excel allows to create
puzzles in different languages. For that, we need to create themes of words in
that specific language and update the list of letters (alphabet) in column A of
sheet “Letters” that are used to fill the grid. The letters of theme words need
to match those of the alphabet. We can revert the original English alphabet
following that option in the ribbon. That would replace whatever changes were
made to column A in sheet Letters.
Export Options
Word Search Pro for Excel allows to export each
puzzle as a picture and/or to Microsoft Word. As we have seen earlier, we can
choose to export the puzzle right after being generated; there is a check box
to do so in the create puzzle dialog. We can also click the buttons in the
ribbon to save the puzzle as picture and to export to Word. Either way, the
settings specified within the export options dialog apply.
We can choose to export the puzzle with tittle
and legend, only with tittle, or without neither the tittle nor the legend. We
can also choose to not export the solution (not recommended). Puzzle and
solution are saved in separate files or documents.
When saved as picture, they are saved as two
separate independent files. Pictures are saved with either png or jpg
extension. The name of file includes a unique reference ID based on day and
time along the puzzle theme name and the words “puzzle” or “solution” for
either case. We can select to open the picture after saving. It is important to
select the folder where pictures are stored. A dialog to choose a folder
prompts the first time we attempt to save a puzzle. The folder path can also be
updated within the export options dialog.
When exported to Word, puzzle and solution are
pasted into separate documents. It is advisable to close any other Word
documents prior to start exporting puzzles to create the KDP puzzle book. Each
puzzle and solution can be pasted into a new page or one after another. A
reference number is added to identify which puzzle belongs to which solution.
Once complete, we need to merge and format those documents as needed.
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