Wyn Hopkins built an Excel-based Wordle game. He saw my video on my Wordle Helper tool and challenged me to solve his game with my Excel file. The results are in.
Wyn's video challenging me to play:
Wyn's How to Build a Wordle Video:
Wyn's Game is at this blog post:
My Wordle Helper Download:
www.mrexcel.com
Wyn's video challenging me to play:
Wyn's How to Build a Wordle Video:
Wyn's Game is at this blog post:
My Wordle Helper Download:
Solve WORDLE Faster with our FREE Wordle Helper in Excel
In January 2022, the Wordle game is blowing up social media, with so many Twitter posts of people showing the Wordle score for the day. I love that there is only one Wordle word each day. It takes 3 minutes of your life and then you are on with the rest of your day.
www.mrexcel.com
Transcript of the video:
Alright, I have a challenge from Wyn Hopkins, Excel MVP.
He has an Excel-based version of Wordle, but it's only words that are in Excel.
He saw my video.
[ Wyn ] But I then saw a video by Bill Jelen – MrExcel - on how to solve Wordle puzzles using Excel.
So here's my challenge to you, Bill.
Try and solve these couple of words - I've got 3 built in here for you - using your tool. And the words are all Excel functions.
[ Bill ] He said, let's see how you do against these Excel words.
Alright, so if you haven't seen my earlier videos, I now have two tools that I'm using.
The first one is a tool to analyze all the possible words, and figure out the letter frequency of those words.
So a lot of the words in Excel are from the Excel function list.
I just used the LEN function to get all the five letter words and then I went through the ribbon looking for various other things.
For example pivot table, power query, clear, Ideas.
Which is not called ideas anymore, it's called Analyze Data, but maybe it's in their. Icons, Chart, Graph.
I use this tool for the universe of possible words to figure out which letters appear most often.
And in this case it's E, S, A, T, I, R, and maybe M.
Let's include O in there, right.
And then I have a second analysis over here where I look for those letters.
Which how many of those letters are appearing in the word list.
And it generates this number of target letters and the score.
And so from my first guess, I'm going to use one of these high scoring things.
Maybe ideas or paste or trace. Just for some variability.
You have to wonder if the person creating the Wordle game (or in this case, Wyn) is friendly or hostile. He's always been friendly to me, right?
But is he going to choose a word that's going to be hard for my tool to guess?
So, I'm going to throw IDEAS at the tool. We switch back here to Wyn’s game.
I am going to type in IDEAS. Right, now….
This is great. So here's what we learned from this.
We've learned that E is definitely there in the this spot.
S is somewhere in the word, but it's not in the fifth spot.
And then also very useful is that I, D and A are not in the word at all.
Now that's some very useful information.
So, I'm going to come back here to the tool that I have available on my website. And when we learn we learn that I, D and A.
So I'm going to choose I, D, and A. Those three are not in the word.
And so here in this None column, I am going to type the number 1.
And press Ctrl+Enter. Now, right now there's 83 words possible.
Once I have this fact that I, D, A do not appear anywhere in the word, then we're going to learn that there's only 19 words possible. And those are the 19 words.
Alright, we learned that the letter E must be in the third position.
And we also learned that S is somewhere in there, but it's not in the fifth position.
We come down here to the S row over into the yellows and here, but not in five, put a one there. So now we're down to five possible words.
FTEST, SHEET, STEYX, TTEST and ZTEST.
This is where I wonder if Wyn is trying to trick me.
Because FTEST, TTEST, and ZTEST would be very very difficult to tell the difference. I might have to waste 3 guesses if I guess wrong.
But look, I'm not going to let my emotions get involved in this.
This is a data experiment here, so I'm going to take those five words.
I'm going to come back to this tool that analyzes the best word.
I'll control+drag the tab to the right. And then I'm going to paste those five words.
Control+C, Alt+E, S, V to paste values. And then we'll get rid of all of these rows.
Alright, so now we're just analyzing the letters in those five words.
Beautiful little formulas here to unwrap those words.
And then we come up over here with the letter frequency and it's really S, T, E followed by a huge tie down there. That's tricky.
Alright so alright I'm going to copy these words over here.
And look at the scores. And it looks like STEYZ is the highest score.
But why would he use that?
I really think that he's probably using FTEST or ZTEST or TTEST.
So I'm just I'm going to ignore the high score here and guess FTEST.
Actually let's guess ZTEST because if he's if he's truly a bad actor he's going to go with the the last one alphabetically.
Alright, so we'll come back in here. I guess ZTEST.
Alright, more information. There's no Z.
We now know that T is in that second position. There is an S.
And there is a second T, but they're not in the 4th and 5th positions.
Just a little picture of this here, so I don't have to flip back and forth.
Alright, so we know there's no Z. Put a one there.
We know that the T has to be in the second position.
Put one there.
We know that the E has to be in the third position.
For the S, we know that it's not in the fourth position. Already there we go.
We're down to one word STEYX. That's the only possible word.
STEYX - alright there we go. Solved it in three.
Actually, if I would have paid attention to the data, I would have solved it in two.
But, I psyched myself out. Now, Wyn gave me a third word here.
The first word was on *his* challenge video. Alright, so now we have to reset.
This is some behind the scenes here, so hang on while I go back to my Excel helper.
And we clear out any ones that are in here. Which should get us back to the 83 words.
That's good. Here we reset back to the original worksheet.
With the 83 words and of course it's still going to suggest IDEAS, PASTE, TRACE.
Let's try PASTE this time just to see what happens.
It has four of the target letters and a score almost as high.
So first guess, PASTE.
Right paste interesting. We learn that there isn't A.
There is a T.
There is an E, but none of them are in the right location. No, P and no S.
So let's do the P and the S first. There's no P.
There's no S. 1 and Ctrl+Enter.
We went from 83 words down to 40 words.
For the A, we know that it's there, but it's not in two.
For the T, we know that it's there, but it's not in four.
And for the E, we know that it's there, but it's not in five.
Oh – EXACT – there we are. There's only one choice.
And we're done. Done in two.
OK, there you go. I'm having a lot of fun with this Wordle game.
A few of you who have watched my earlier video said “Oh well, that's cheating”.
And if you feel like it's cheating then just use it after the fact to analyze your guesses, you know.
And if you like Wordle, if you're enjoying this, make sure to check out Wyn Hopkins’ version.
I'll put a link down there in the YouTube description.
Where you can try it out with various Excel words.
It gives you a chance for a second chance to play each day.
So hey, thanks to Wyn for sending that challenge out.
Wyn, I was able to come up with it in both cases in two or three, depending on whether I listen to the data or not.
Alright Wyn.
Hey, thanks for the challenge and thanks to everyone for watching.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
He has an Excel-based version of Wordle, but it's only words that are in Excel.
He saw my video.
[ Wyn ] But I then saw a video by Bill Jelen – MrExcel - on how to solve Wordle puzzles using Excel.
So here's my challenge to you, Bill.
Try and solve these couple of words - I've got 3 built in here for you - using your tool. And the words are all Excel functions.
[ Bill ] He said, let's see how you do against these Excel words.
Alright, so if you haven't seen my earlier videos, I now have two tools that I'm using.
The first one is a tool to analyze all the possible words, and figure out the letter frequency of those words.
So a lot of the words in Excel are from the Excel function list.
I just used the LEN function to get all the five letter words and then I went through the ribbon looking for various other things.
For example pivot table, power query, clear, Ideas.
Which is not called ideas anymore, it's called Analyze Data, but maybe it's in their. Icons, Chart, Graph.
I use this tool for the universe of possible words to figure out which letters appear most often.
And in this case it's E, S, A, T, I, R, and maybe M.
Let's include O in there, right.
And then I have a second analysis over here where I look for those letters.
Which how many of those letters are appearing in the word list.
And it generates this number of target letters and the score.
And so from my first guess, I'm going to use one of these high scoring things.
Maybe ideas or paste or trace. Just for some variability.
You have to wonder if the person creating the Wordle game (or in this case, Wyn) is friendly or hostile. He's always been friendly to me, right?
But is he going to choose a word that's going to be hard for my tool to guess?
So, I'm going to throw IDEAS at the tool. We switch back here to Wyn’s game.
I am going to type in IDEAS. Right, now….
This is great. So here's what we learned from this.
We've learned that E is definitely there in the this spot.
S is somewhere in the word, but it's not in the fifth spot.
And then also very useful is that I, D and A are not in the word at all.
Now that's some very useful information.
So, I'm going to come back here to the tool that I have available on my website. And when we learn we learn that I, D and A.
So I'm going to choose I, D, and A. Those three are not in the word.
And so here in this None column, I am going to type the number 1.
And press Ctrl+Enter. Now, right now there's 83 words possible.
Once I have this fact that I, D, A do not appear anywhere in the word, then we're going to learn that there's only 19 words possible. And those are the 19 words.
Alright, we learned that the letter E must be in the third position.
And we also learned that S is somewhere in there, but it's not in the fifth position.
We come down here to the S row over into the yellows and here, but not in five, put a one there. So now we're down to five possible words.
FTEST, SHEET, STEYX, TTEST and ZTEST.
This is where I wonder if Wyn is trying to trick me.
Because FTEST, TTEST, and ZTEST would be very very difficult to tell the difference. I might have to waste 3 guesses if I guess wrong.
But look, I'm not going to let my emotions get involved in this.
This is a data experiment here, so I'm going to take those five words.
I'm going to come back to this tool that analyzes the best word.
I'll control+drag the tab to the right. And then I'm going to paste those five words.
Control+C, Alt+E, S, V to paste values. And then we'll get rid of all of these rows.
Alright, so now we're just analyzing the letters in those five words.
Beautiful little formulas here to unwrap those words.
And then we come up over here with the letter frequency and it's really S, T, E followed by a huge tie down there. That's tricky.
Alright so alright I'm going to copy these words over here.
And look at the scores. And it looks like STEYZ is the highest score.
But why would he use that?
I really think that he's probably using FTEST or ZTEST or TTEST.
So I'm just I'm going to ignore the high score here and guess FTEST.
Actually let's guess ZTEST because if he's if he's truly a bad actor he's going to go with the the last one alphabetically.
Alright, so we'll come back in here. I guess ZTEST.
Alright, more information. There's no Z.
We now know that T is in that second position. There is an S.
And there is a second T, but they're not in the 4th and 5th positions.
Just a little picture of this here, so I don't have to flip back and forth.
Alright, so we know there's no Z. Put a one there.
We know that the T has to be in the second position.
Put one there.
We know that the E has to be in the third position.
For the S, we know that it's not in the fourth position. Already there we go.
We're down to one word STEYX. That's the only possible word.
STEYX - alright there we go. Solved it in three.
Actually, if I would have paid attention to the data, I would have solved it in two.
But, I psyched myself out. Now, Wyn gave me a third word here.
The first word was on *his* challenge video. Alright, so now we have to reset.
This is some behind the scenes here, so hang on while I go back to my Excel helper.
And we clear out any ones that are in here. Which should get us back to the 83 words.
That's good. Here we reset back to the original worksheet.
With the 83 words and of course it's still going to suggest IDEAS, PASTE, TRACE.
Let's try PASTE this time just to see what happens.
It has four of the target letters and a score almost as high.
So first guess, PASTE.
Right paste interesting. We learn that there isn't A.
There is a T.
There is an E, but none of them are in the right location. No, P and no S.
So let's do the P and the S first. There's no P.
There's no S. 1 and Ctrl+Enter.
We went from 83 words down to 40 words.
For the A, we know that it's there, but it's not in two.
For the T, we know that it's there, but it's not in four.
And for the E, we know that it's there, but it's not in five.
Oh – EXACT – there we are. There's only one choice.
And we're done. Done in two.
OK, there you go. I'm having a lot of fun with this Wordle game.
A few of you who have watched my earlier video said “Oh well, that's cheating”.
And if you feel like it's cheating then just use it after the fact to analyze your guesses, you know.
And if you like Wordle, if you're enjoying this, make sure to check out Wyn Hopkins’ version.
I'll put a link down there in the YouTube description.
Where you can try it out with various Excel words.
It gives you a chance for a second chance to play each day.
So hey, thanks to Wyn for sending that challenge out.
Wyn, I was able to come up with it in both cases in two or three, depending on whether I listen to the data or not.
Alright Wyn.
Hey, thanks for the challenge and thanks to everyone for watching.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
