Crossword

Welcome to my Crossword page...

Crossword puzzles have been around for centuries and remain a popular way of exercising the 'grey matter' to this day - ever more important to help keep dementia at bay as our population  gets progressively older....

If you're new to crossword puzzles, the secret  to a successful introduction to this entertaining, but sometimes frustrating pastime is straightforward - keep it simple. 

Diving straight into the 'behemoths' of the crossword world such as the Times cryptic will not help your confidence at all, and may even put you off crosswords for life. 

A good place to start is an online daily puzzle page - a good example to try is the simplydailypuzzles.com daily crossword. This has help available while working on each puzzle, in addition to an immediate solution after you've completed it. You can even print the puzzle you're working on as hard copy or as a .pdf if you want to take it away and ponder over it at your leisure.

For those who, like me, prefer to do their board-game computing on a pc, and like to see how the 'nuts and bolts' of it work, I've also generated a stand-alone  Crossword Helper which runs under MS Excel.  This will check a partial solution to a clue (i.e. a word with some of the letters missing) against a list of ca 380,000 english words for matches. It will also help you by searching a  database of 40,000 words for synonyms, which are the basis of most 'quick' crosswords, and will also help with some of the more cryptic clues. You can also limit the output of synonyms found to the number of letters in your clue. It will even look for synonym matches in your list of possible solutions from the partial word search if the list is a long one. The helper will also reproduce your puzzle board if needed - this can be useful when testing out clues you're not sure of and avoids messing up the paper copy.

You can download the latest version  via the downloads page (Crossword_Helper V2.2.xlsm) and run it alongside your online crossword or printed copy.  It is entirely stand-alone and does not require an internet connection.

The Excel workbook is easy to use and has a User Guide built-in. You may also find this  little utility useful if you move on to more difficult crossword variants. It won't help much with the most cryptic clues, though...best of luck with those - even AI solvers will struggle with many of them ! 

You can even see how the Visual Basic  code that powers the search actually works - just select 'Developer' and 'Visual basic' options  from the main and second menus and you'll see the listing.

(Crossword Helper might also be quite useful to you if you're a scrabble fan....).

Why not give it a test-drive  ?

Happy solving.....

PS If  you get 'hooked' and are desperate for some help with cryptic clues, and faced with huge lists of possibilities from Helper try the online Crossword Clue database - it might just save your sanity...

Are there any sources of electronic crosswords out there ? 

The answer to this question is  - Yes. There are libraries of puzzles in  a semi-standardised format, usually with the extension .puz. To access and solve these on your pc, the best free software available is the Across Lite package which you can download (for Windows 7 pcs and above) from https://www.litsoft.com/across/alite/download/.  This will load .puz files and allow you to complete the puzzle, with built-in timer and reveal features.

For quick crossword fans, you can access the Daily Puzzles Archive at https://simplydailypuzzles.com/daily-quick-crossword/archive.html. This gives you access to the last 3 month's puzzles. If you want to save the puzzle as a .puz file for offline solving, and have access to Google's Chrome browser, you can do this using the Chrome extension 'Crossword Scraper'. Load the puzzle of choice into Chrome and start the extension. You should then see an option to save as a .puz file. You'll find the file in your downloads directory.

Can I make my own crosswords ? 

For those who would like to try their hand at actually authoring Crosswords,  there are unfortunately no free packages for pc; Crossword Compiler is the most widely quoted authoring package. Unfortunately this is quite expensive as ageing pc software goes at $49. All is not lost if you have a limited budget, however.  If you have an android phone or tablet, a useful free-to-download alternative I would recommend is the 'Crossword Maker' app; you can download this free as an .apk (compatible with A4.4 and above) from APK Pure or other .apk/.xapk libraries. This app does have a rather irritating habit of storing puzzles in the system partition where they are hidden unless your device is rooted. You can however transfer puzzles to your Google Drive and then re-download them to tablet/phone or pc if you wish to access the .puz files separately. You can then  upload them into Crossword Maker or Across Lite if you want to solve them on your pc.

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