Make a Word Find Puzzle With Excel or OpenOffice Calc
You can make your own word find puzzle with a spreadsheet program if you follow these directions. I used OpenOffice, so if you are using Excel or something else, there may be some minor variations. You may need to make a list ahead of time of the words you hope to use, perhaps related to a unit study your children are doing. Most kids really enjoy doing a word find once in awhile.
1. The first step is to create a spreadsheet the size you want. Twelve rows by twelve columns is a nice basic size. The way you create this spreadsheet is to go to the top cell of the grid and highlight across over to letter L. Then you highlight down to row 12.
2. Now go to Format, to Row, and to Height and click on it. Click on the box until you have increased the row height to .38 inches. Click on OK. The cell height should change on your spreadsheet.
3. Next, go to Format, to Column, to Width, and click. Click on the box until you have decreased the width to .39 inches. Click on OK. What you have done is to create a 12 x 12 grid in which the cells are almost exactly square.
4. Go to Format, and to Page, and then click. You will have a choice of page style options opened up. You are going to use Header for the title of your puzzle, and Footer for your list of words. Click on Header.
5. Make sure the box by “Header on” is checked, and also the box by “AutoFit height” should be checked. Click on Edit. In the “Center area” you will see “Sheet 1″ and it’s highlighted. Click on the box and backspace to make Sheet 1 disappear. Type the name of your puzzle in this space. Click on OK. When you get good at this, you can experiment with customizing the header but for now, we’ll leave it as is.
6. Now go to Format, (the page style box might still be open), and click on Footer. Again, make sure the boxes are checked, and click on Edit.
7. The three boxes give you places to put your words. Highlight and backspace to get “Page 1″ out of the center area box. If you want three columns of words on your puzzle sheet, type 1/3 of them in the left area box, 1/3 in the center box, and 1/3 in the right box. If there aren’t that many words, you can keep them all in one list in one box, (probably center.) When you’ve entered your words, click OK. Click OK again to close the box.
8. Something to remember with the spreadsheet program is that your working surface does not look much like what you are going to end up with! To see what you have, you have to click on the little print preview icon. Then you have to close the print preview window to get back to your work. As in all projects of this nature, remember to hit save often!
9. Now for the fun! With caps lock on, start typing one letter at a time into the cells and arranging your words. You should start with your longest words, then look for ways to have them cross each other, sharing letters. Don’t forget to make some backwards, up and down, and diagonal. Fill smaller words in the spaces left over. If you have to tweak your word list a little to fit the final product, just go back to Format, to Footer, and to Edit, to make the changes.
10. Adding clip art is a great idea if you know how to do it and have access to some images. I’m not prepared to tell you much about how to do this right now. My daughter had some pictures collected, so I grabbed one of hers for my version of this project, but I’d rather have something else. To add it, you click on Insert, then on Picture, and then you have to hunt for the picture you want. Not hard once you get the hang of it, but not really necessary to the finished product in this case. If you try to add some, your picture will show up somewhere on your spreadsheet, and you can then drag it over to the side and place it where it won’t be in the way.
11. Check your print preview again. If it looks like it would be a better worksheet turned horizontally on the page, go to Format, to Page, to Page, and then click the circle by Landscape instead of Portrait. Click OK.
12. If your print preview is like you want it (no perfectionism allowed!) then print it up! Don’t forget to save it, since you might want to use these again, and it does take a little effort to make it up.
Here’s the sample I made this morning! Unfortunately it’s laying on it’s side! I’ll try to fix that if I can. It features 24 books of the Old Testament. Some of them are somewhat abbreviated. (I didn’t even try with Ecclesiastes!) If you want to make your own copy, click on Print Preview on your web browser, then increase the size to 150%. It should make a decent worksheet for you, if you’re into Bible books right now.
Have fun! Your kids might enjoy creating word find puzzles for each other. Fitting the words in is challenging and enjoyable for people who like to play around with words and letters.
February 18th, 2006 at 10:29 am
That’s not a bad idea! I made up an example of my own following your directions and it turned out looking pretty good. Although it was a bit time consuming, this is a great way to help students slow down and think about the process of creation. If they go too fast they’re going to have to redo words and/or the puzzle to fit everything in.
February 18th, 2006 at 11:29 am
[…] While reading Barbara’s blog, I found this terrific tutorial for using Excel or OpenOffice to create a word search from scratch. By following Barbara’s directions (which were very simple and thorough) I managed to create my own word search quickly and easily. If you have a few minutes click on over to Plugged In HomeSchool and give her tutorial a try. Feel free to post your examples in the forum. […]
February 19th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
Thanks! I forgot one step, though. You might want to select all and change the font and size after getting the letters all in on step 9.
February 20th, 2006 at 6:42 am
One more note - do check out The Tech Savvy Educator. It’s a neat forum with lots of ideas for using technology in teaching.
February 20th, 2006 at 11:03 am
Times Tables Quiz Sheet in OpenOffice.org Calc: The File, and How to Do It
For one of the exercises in my training materials, I put together an exercise using the random number function. It’s a times table document that regenerates itself every time you open it. Click this image to see a larger version.
October 30th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
I use spreadsheet applications to design a lot of the puzzles on my website, www.thegriddle.net. I actually found this site while doing homework for my MS Excel class and had an idea. If you are using the puzzle for multiple children, there is a way to make the puzzle appear randomly generated when in fact it has the same positioning as the other puzzles. With this method there is a chance that the random letters could actually form one of the target words, but it’s unlikely with longer words. All you need to do is fill the grid with the function:
=CHAR(RANDBETWEEN(65;90))
Which will generate random letters (all caps) in the grid. Then replace the squares with ‘hard-coded’ letters where you want your answers to be, and voila, seemingly random grids! I hope this is helpful to someone, somewhere
Dave
PS: I did this in OpenOffice, but if you change the semicolon to a comma it will probably work in MS Excel as well. And did you know that Google has a spreadhseet application too? http://docs.google.com