Here at Crossword Nexus, we’re always improving our offerings but we don’t always publicize them. Well, let’s break that trend and publicize improvements to the Google Sheets we’ve created for crossword construction. As you may recall, they are:
- The Collaborative Crossword sheet, available at https://tinyurl.com/xw-collab
- The iPuz generation sheet, available at https://tinyurl.com/make-ipuz
The first sheet is especially useful if you want to collaborate with someone on crossword clues, while the second is useful for making puzzles where the clues are decoupled from the entries. We’ve discussed them both here, but here are some improvements we’ve made since they’ve launched:
- There is no longer a scary prompt from Google about the security of these sheets. To be clear, they never did anything dangerous with your data, but now the warning is gone.
- You can import an iPuz file to the collab sheet in order to fill out the grid. This will save you from tediously copying over every letter one by one.
- If you shade cells in either sheet, the colors will be retained in the exported iPuz. This can save you from having to go in and edit the iPuz file in a text editor or some such.
- Additional clue columns have been added to the collab sheet, so each collaborator can add their own thoughts.
If you’ve been using these sheets all along, we hope you enjoy the new features. If you haven’t, why not get started? I’d love to see more collabs and tricky puzzles in my future.