My Hanjie Process VIII

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.


We essentially have the puzzle finished. Some puzzles are impossible, so we are going to have to test it. Today, I will explain how I format the puzzle for testing. Let's start where we left off at Sheet 7 on the spreadsheet found at: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=2E6EFB80915ED5BD!8515&authkey=!AKAkVk-yARu-vQ4&ithint=file%2cxlsx

In the template that I have been using for counting, I have a merged cell in the upper-left corner. I start there and drag the mouse to select the entire used portion of the grid. I then copy and paste into a new worksheet. Sometimes I overwrite a previous puzzle. If not, I select the new worksheet and change column widths to 1.29 and row heights to 9.75. This can be found in sheet 8.

The next step is easy. I select the main grid (not the counts above and to the left) and delete all the 1's in the puzzle. I have saved the new version in sheet 9.

Then I delete all the blank rows and columns. Predictably, this is sheet 10.

For good measure, I add thick borders around the sections where the counts are located. And yes, this is sheet 11.

I could always print this out, but I have other plans. Not only will I format the puzzle for printing at the end of this series, but I would prefer not to have to scan when showing the testing phase. I will be solving this puzzle by using fill colors in Excel. Shaded cells will be black. Unshaded cells will be white. If I have not yet determined if a cell is shaded, it will be gray. I will start at the upper-left merged cell and highlight the entire puzzle, then I will select a 50% dark fill. This would be sheet 12.

We are now ready to test.

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