My Hanjie Process V

If you have visited my Mental Exercise blog, you are probably aware of the fact that I have been making hanjie/nongram/griddler/crosspic/piccross/edel/Japanese puzzles for years. I have decided to show my process from start to finish on how I actually put these together including development of the image, preparing the numbers, testing, and conversion to PDF.


In my previous post, I explained how I determine which cells are going to be shaded and which will be left unshaded in my Gull puzzle as seen in the image below.

 
No matter how good you are, there is always the possibility of errors while counting. Not only that, but some puzzles can be impossible to solve. I prefer to let Excel help with the counting to reduce errors and simplify further counting if changes have to be made.

I maintain a template to help with the process. I have uploaded a variant online at: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=2E6EFB80915ED5BD!7519&authkey=!ANdoNrzEbmfV6XA&ithint=file%2cxls

If you go to worksheet 1, you will see an old puzzle. I usually have something saved because I don't do everything in one sitting and prefer to have a copy of everything when I'm working on a puzzle. This way, I don't have to redo anything if I need to make any tweaks.

I use conditional formatting for these puzzles. To delete the old puzzle, I delete the contents. I keep the headers because they can help me. I will be left with an empty grid, which has been saved as worksheet 2, showing the wrong size.

The shading us used to help see the size of the final puzzle. This was obviously set for the previous puzzle. To fix this, I add No Fill for the fill color on the 31st through 45th column of the puzzle. I would take a similar approach on rows if this new puzzle would have required a greater height than the previous. I also add the darkest gray in the first column of the fill menu (50%) to rows 21 through 40 of the puzzle (note that the rows of the puzzle do not match the rows as listed in Excel). Similarly, I could have added shading to the columns if I wanted to reduce the width. This has been saved as worksheet 3.

I think that's enough for today. Next time, I will actually work on adding information regarding which cells will be shaded. I'm still not ready for the counting.

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