Crosswords are a fun and extremely useful puzzle. Scientists believe that their first prototypes appeared in the I-IV century. This is evidenced, in particular, by the fact that during excavations in the legendary Pompeii a puzzle very similar to them was found. The find was dated 79 AD.
The first crossword puzzle, which corresponds to modern ideas, was invented by a man named Arthur Wynn and was placed in the Sunday edition of the New York World in late 1913.
Now everyone can come up with and draw their own rebus. What is needed for this? A little free time, an interesting idea and, of course, your desire. In this article, we will try to figure out how to make a crossword puzzle in Word, a popular text editor from the Microsoft Office suite.
Step 1. Create a table
Open MS Word and go to the tab “Insert” -> “Table”. In the menu that appears, you will see the option “Insert table”. Click on this button.
A new window will appear on the screen in which you can specify the parameters for the future table: the number and width of columns, the number of rows.
The size of your future crossword puzzle will depend on the number of columns and lines. In general, in order not to miscalculate, it is better to first come up with questions and draw a layout of the future puzzle on a piece of paper: this way you can always see what should turn out in the end.
Suppose you decide that you need a 10x10 cell table. Let's figure out how to make a crossword puzzle in Word, just on such an example. In the fields “Number of rows” and “Number of columns” you need to enter the number 10. As for the width, it is best to set the switch to “Constant”, and instead of “Auto” enter the value from 0.5 to 0.6 cm next to it - this is the cell will immediately be square.
Step 2. Change the table parameters
We continue to understand how to create a crossword puzzle in Word. So, the table appeared on the screen. But, as you see, she is very small. Move the mouse to the lower right corner of the plate so that the diagonal arrow appears, hold down the Shift key and stretch it to the size you need.
By clicking on the upper left corner, you can move the table on the sheet, for example, place it in the center.
After that we need to change the thickness of the borders. Select an entire object. The yellow tab “Work with tables” will appear in the upper menu, inside which there is an item “Layout”. Open it and in the leftmost paragraph "Table" select the "Properties" button. In the window that appears, we need to click on “Borders and Fill ...”, and then change the border width to 1.5 pt and save the changes.
Step 3. Create the markup
We continue to understand how to make a crossword puzzle in Word. We return to the tab "Home" and find the item "Borders". Here we need to select two options: “No Border” and “Show Grid”. After that, only service markup will be displayed on the screen, which will not be visible when printing.
Step 4. Enter the answers
Now, to understand how a printed and filled crossword puzzle will look like, you need to enter the correct answers in the appropriate fields and put down the numbering.
After you do this, select the question numbers and change the character type to “Superscript”. This can be done in the main tab of the program, in the same place where we change the style to bold, underlined, etc.
Next, you need to align the width of the rows and columns. To do this, select the tablet, right-click on it and find the items of the same name in the context menu that appears.
Step 5. Preparing the crossword for printing
Creating a crossword puzzle in Word is nearing completion. We have already done the bulk of the work. Now it remains only to highlight the boundaries that should remain in the printing process. To do this, we select each word in turn, and then in the “Borders” tab, which is already familiar to us, in the editor’s main menu, select the “All Borders” item.
Step 6. The finishing touches
In fact, you already know how to do a crossword puzzle in Word. Only a couple of details remained. To see what the puzzle will look like, ready to solve before printing, select the entire table and deselect “Display Grid” in the “Borders” tab. The auxiliary lines will disappear, and you will see only the crossword itself. In order not to get confused, it is better to print both versions, just in case, with and without written answers. For convenience, questions can be placed on the same sheet as the rebus itself.
You can slightly increase the font size so that the numbering is better visible.
To see what happened in the end, and whether we really understood how to draw a crossword puzzle in Word, you can go to the tab “View” -> “Scale” before printing and specify “Entire Page” in the window that appears. Now you see the fruits of your labor exactly as they will appear in printed form.
A quick tip: if the rebus is composed in such a way that a new key word is made up of individual letters of other words, you can select the necessary cells in a different color by selecting "Fill" on the main toolbar and indicating the appropriate shade.