Every white square must somehow connect to every other white square.Words must be at least three letters long.That is, to say, if you turn it upside down it will look the same as it does the correct way up. If you haven’t done many crosswords or had some wild reason to look up the grid creation process, you might not realise that there are guidelines on what is allowed or not in a crossword grid. While this wasn’t the most extensive plan ever created, it did quickly provide me with a starting point for what felt like a pretty intimidating project. Find a way to automate the assignment of clues for those given words.Find a way to fit random words from the dictionary into the grid.Build a workflow that creates a crossword grid, which follows the basic rules of grid building.Since unfortunately there is no crossword clue solving tool currently available, I instead began to plan how I could use Alteryx to create the crosswords that people could (in theory) solve.

Once thought to be too difficult, I’ve finally started to get the hang of them with some help getting started from a wizard/friend/colleague, Finn.Īs is seemingly becoming tradition with everything I do these days, I began to think of ways I could integrate Alteryx with my new crosswording hobby. I normally have a favourite puzzle on the go, and in 2023 that’s been the cryptic crossword.

Cryptic crosswords puzzles free online