At Crossword Nexus, we’re all about collaboration. It’s why we’ve opened up the Collaborative Word List for anyone to modify and use, and why we’re releasing more and more of our codebase on GitHub. With that in mind, we’re beyond pleased to announce a collaboration with the good folks at Beyond Wordplay: a Google sheet for (what else?) collaboratively creating crosswords!
Head over to that link and you’ll see a Google sheet with a few tabs which will allow you to make a crossword. Before you edit it, though, you’ll have to make a copy for yourself. There’s a sheet for the grid, of course, which you can resize by changing the “height” and “width” numbers on that sheet, and fill by typing letters in the grid or periods for black squares. Once you’ve made the grid you can mosey on over to the Clues tab to see your words and enter the clues. You can head to the Stats tab to see some basic statistics about the grid you’ve created. Finally, you can click the custom “Puzzle Export” menu at the top to create some text in one of a few formats, to be able to pull into your favorite crossword software. Since it’s on a Google sheet, everything is version-controlled and easily shareable with anyone else in the world with a Google account.
Enjoy! We look forward to seeing what amazing creations you all cook up with this.