The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[swaatacba]

A brief discussion about the presentation of the detail of solution techniques in Excel.

https://swaatacba.blogspot.com/2019/05/sudoku-options-for-layout-and-analysis.html

[Wecoc]

As someone who digged into that hole many times I have to say Excel is not the best tool to do sudokus, mainly because it's way too easy to miss mistakes there.

That being said, your approach is good but I'm not a big fan of using a column for each candidate. What I do is use a cell for each sudoku cell and implement custom formatting to differenciate between givens (well, you can mark those in the very start), solved cells and unsolved cells.

Candidates: Show

Little trick to make the candidates red in Excel:
Select the 9x9 grid
Menus -> Format -> Conditional Formatting -> New Rule
Format only cells that contain (second option) -> Value greater than: 9

That makes the candidates red and also if you write a single candidate starting with ' it will be displayed as red, too.

Copycat: Show

Here's another trick I used in some hard puzzles:
- Make nine copies of the puzzle that directly update, using =(ID OF THE CELL)
- Conditional Formatting on the 1st copy to search for all cells that include "1" in their character string, fill them with a color.
- Same with "2" on the 2nd copy and so on.

That makes easier to spot mistakes, singles, pointing pairs, etc.

[swaatacba]

Your solutions are interesting, although I am not sure that I have grasped the detail fully.

That said, I agree that using Excel to develop a quick solution methodology for Sudoku puzzles is counter productive. From my perspective that is not the point. I wanted to validate each user move and reject it if it failed validation.

I confess that 99% of the spreadsheet community would agree that process and process validation is important but only that final solution needs to be shown. For me the whole point of spreadsheets, is that you should use them to demonstrate the process and its validation methodology.