conditional formating: spell check

[jed_vii]

is there a way to use spell check as a function?

I am working on code breaking, and am working on trying multiple letter combinations, and was wondering if I could spell check the results and have that identify letter combinations that ARE words.

any thoughts?

-jed

[Simon Lloyd]

is there a way to use spell check as a function?

I am working on code breaking, and am working on trying ....-jed

Can you explain your statement further?

[jed_vii]

basically what I'm doing is trying every letter combination for the key, starting with 1 letter, then 2 letters, on to 3, 4, etc.

I'm doing it 26 words at a time, because that's how many I can see on the screen at a time, and I'm visually scanning them to see if any of the letter combinations (after dencryption with the key as stated above) are words.

I was thinking that if I could use spell check (scanning the new letter combinations) to tell me which were words, then I could speed things up by not having to read each new letter combination.

right now, if I use the spell check funciton, it only shows which words are misspelled, I want to know which are spelled correctly (which ARE words).

So there are a few possibilities... first, run spell and have it delete all mispelled words. Second, run spell check and have it highlight the words spelled correctly.

The second option is why I asked about conditional formatting. If you could use that to change the cells of all correctly spelled words to green, or the bad words to red, then I could visually scan a large section much more quickly.

-jed

[dominicb]

Good afternoon jed_vii

Have a look at the attached file : it's a program I started working on which does what you seem to be after, but was the basis of a game - abondoned because VBA wasn't fast enough.

On the left is a list of 5,580 six letter words. One of these words is chosen at random. Click the button and one of these words is shown scrambled. Click Reveal to show the word, or click Find Words to show the 4,5 and 6 letter words that can be made up of these letters that Excel's built in dictionary will accept.

HTH

DominicB

[Simon Lloyd]

If you delete misspelled words it will delete everything, as if it is not correct it must be incorrect therefore must be deleted, so there will only be correct words left.

In any case what code are you trying to break and why?

[jed_vii]

Here's an example of what I'm doing.

I only went A-H to show as an example. I'd go A-Z for the full version.

So I change the KEY letters, which gives me all possible results in the table on the right. I want to be able to glance at the table (a-z columns and 26 rows) and identify the possible 4 letter words.

I don't care how big the file is. Is there a way to get excel to list all 4 letter words in its dictionary? then I can use vlookups to find the words.

-jed

[dominicb]

Hi jed_vii

Something like this will list all four letter words that are accepted by the dictionary. This routine will check 456,976 combinations (26^4), so don't expect it to finish anytime soon. I have only tried it with 3 letters (17,576 combinations) which yielded 1,101 words and took a few minutes to run.

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HTH

DominicB

[shg]

You could use conditional formatting to check the words against a sorted dictionary of four-letter words:

Formula is: =isnumber(match(Me, Words4, 0)) and highlight appropriately.

[jed_vii]

all good advice. I found a four letter word list from scrabble. I then sorted it out and am using VLOOKUPs to see if they are in the list and then conditionally formatting the cells to red and green if true.

Nothing like the brute force method.

-jed

[shg]

I think MATCH against a sorted list will be faster. And since a word either is or isn't on the list, you only need one format condition; set the default to red and conditionally format to green, or vice versa.