My Hanjie Process VII

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.


Before I start, I will be using and referring to a spreadsheet that can be found at: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=2E6EFB80915ED5BD!8485&authkey=!ANRHuLYJSkb7Uog&ithint=file%2cxlsx

Now that I have the individual cells marked for shading, it's time to provide the counts. I have a sheet that has already been setup to assist with the counting. I delete values from the last puzzle. I remove the fill from the rows and columns that are part of the puzzle, and I add the 50% dark fill to rows and columns that are not a part of the puzzle (Worksheet 5).

My spreadsheet will provide a sum of the counts I will provide for each row and column as I enter them, a count of cells that are marked to be shaded for those rows and columns (the 1's), and a comparison. When each row and column is counted, they should show a difference of 0. I also have a few checks to find any errors. If everything is counted correctly, the Correct? value will show TRUE.

Of course, I have to count for these calculations to work. Before I start the count, I copy and paste the values from my previous shading sheet (Worksheet 4) into this counting sheet. Conditional formatting is off for this one, so you will wind up with 1's showing in the grid (Worksheet 6).

The counts are automatically calculated. I'm also showing minus values for the differences. Some are showing #. This means that the column isn't wide enough to show the value. These numbers should fit, even if we make small mistakes, once we are done counting. Also notice that Correct? now shows FALSE.

I prefer to count rows from right to left and columns from bottom to top. That way I can add them to the grid where they will go as I'm counting. Keep in mind the rules. We are counting consecutive cells that will be shaded (currently showing 1). If there is a space, we will finish a value and move to the next.

Here's how my spreadsheet looks after finishing counting (Worksheet 7).

I'm at all zeros for the differences. My quick checks for the minimums and maximums proves it. I'm showing true for Correct? If you want another quick check, you can check the count or sum of the shaded cells by dragging over the puzzle grid (not the counts we just provided) if the status bar has been set up for sum or count. If it's not set up, just right click. Since we are using 1's, count and sum should provide the same results. These results can be compared to the values at the bottom right of the grid, 358. It looks like I counted everything correctly on this one.

Next time, I will prepare the puzzle for testing.

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