Troubleshooting Word Search Problems

If you are having trouble with word searches try the things below to work out the issues.

On the setup screen of word searches it says these things, make sure all these things are followed:

• Make sure all the words are in one column (column A).
• Words / Phrases limited to 20 characters.
• Maximum of 25 Words Per Puzzle.
• Make sure your project has enough pages (If you want to have 50 puzzles with solutions, you need to have 100 page project at least 50 + 50 = 100). Immediately after clicking Word Search from the page templates, the first thing it asks you to do is pick the pages to put puzzles on. Do not select pages to put the solutions on, on this step, you are only picking the page to put the puzzle on. It will ask the pages to put solutions in later steps. Meaning, if you did a 100 page project, do not pick all 100 pages to put the puzzle on, you will pick 50 or less. The solutions part is on the options page and if you pick the pages to put solutions on, you pick those pages later.

If all of the above are correct, and you are still getting a message about not enough words, follow the steps below:

In Microsoft Excel you should save as "CSV (Comma Delimited) (*.csv)", there are 4 types, please choose that one).

If you you think you have enough words, double check that you do (multiply words per page you pick x number of pages you want puzzles on). In Microsft Excel, just click column A to highlight the whole column and look on bottom right of the screen, to the left of the scroll bar and you wil see "Count" and the number of words and it will not count the blank rows. Google sheets does not show this.

If you confirm you have enough, then you need to make sure your words / phrases are not more than 20 characters. If you go to the FAQ, we have 5 How To's to help with your word search file. See this one, to have it count the number of characters for you https://bookbolt.kb.help/tutorial-how-can-i-determine-quickly-how-many-characters-in-a-cell-of-my-csv-file/.

In some cases a csv file may not save properly due to encoding issues. The easiest way to solve this is to click column A, right click and copy, go to Google Sheets and paste it into the sheet. Then click download and choose "comma-seperated values (.csv)" and it will be saved in your computer's default download folder. Use that file for your word search.

For a short video see this: