I was hoping that Excel can take a series of letters, un-jumble them and
then compare the result with words in the dictionary and tell me which
ones are actual words. Can something like this be done?

I like doing those "Word Jumble" puzzles, but sometimes need help to
solve them

Warren


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Yes, but I suspect it would be easier to just work out the puzzle! :) You'd
need to loop through several iterations of swapping two letters, checking
against a list of words, swap two more characters, etc. I'll leave it to
someone else to code it.

"WarrenC" wrote:


I was hoping that Excel can take a series of letters, un-jumble them and
then compare the result with words in the dictionary and tell me which
ones are actual words. Can something like this be done?

I like doing those "Word Jumble" puzzles, but sometimes need help to
solve them

Warren


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WarrenC
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WarrenC wrote:
I was hoping that Excel can take a series of letters, un-jumble them and
then compare the result with words in the dictionary and tell me which
ones are actual words. Can something like this be done?

I like doing those "Word Jumble" puzzles, but sometimes need help to
solve them


Might be better to take your dictionary, extract the word list, and make
a lookup table with two columns - each word, and the same letters
in sorted order. Searching that should be a whole lot easier than
testing every permutation of a set of characters.



Bob
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Years ago I made a simple "Basic" program on my Commodore Vic20 tha
went through every permutation and listed them. I then just went dow
the list until I spotted the word. Unfortunately I can't remember how
did it and it's been bugging me ever since. I have managed to use th
random number generator to give me the permutation and the "CONCENTATE
to take the letters and form a word. I just don' t know how to make
list of all the combinations and compare them to the dictionary.

Warre

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WarrenC wrote:
I just don' t know how to make a
list of all the combinations and compare them to the dictionary.


That's one of those things that's trivial to express, but much more involved
to actually DO. Not as bad as the story where you put a grain of wheat on a
chessboard square, then two on the next square, and then twice as many again
on each subsequent square.

There's a lot of permutations...
Two letters - two ways
Three letters - six ways
[...]
Seven letters - over five THOUSAND ways!

Which is why I strongly suggest side-stepping the permutation problem entirely.
Sort each word in your word list. Then when you get a puzzle string, sort it
the same way and simply look it up.


Bob
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