Other uses for Google Spreadsheets: Word-find puzzles?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

An amusing entry in the Google Docs and Spreadsheets Blog highlights a neat use for the online app: word-find puzzles. The idea came to Jonathan Rochelle (a Google Spreadsheets product manager) when his son came home pining to create his own puzzle like the one his teacher had given his class at school. Rochelle's solution? Google Spreadsheets, of course.

You won't get complex auto-creation and custom publishing tools like you'll find in standalone software apps. You could also achieve similar results using Excel. What makes Google Spreadsheets neat is the ability to embed for sharing. Your embed will automatically update itself every five minutes, in case you make changes. If a person really wanted to put the time in, he or she could create a word-find feed, using nothing but Google Spreadsheets.

Our Webware word-find puzzle can be found here. Have any other peculiar uses for Google Docs and Spreadsheets? Let us know.

[jonrochelle]

and there's more to the story...

There was more to the story, where immediate user feedback comes from said 6 year-old to said daddy-product-mgr (http://jrsays.com has the post on that), but a couple of other useful ideas:
- The one we did actualy uses the randbetween() function now to generate random letters first - then we just overlay the words we want to hide...
- The completely random grid (using random generated letters) is even better as a "boggle"-like game (tm required there, no doubt) - where people try to make as many words as possible using the random letters... winner is the person with the most points - where 3 letter words are 3 points, 4 letter-words are 4 points, etc...
- Crosswords work pretty well too... but the numbers (e.g. 3 across) have to be hand drawn i guess ;)

Any more game ideas (beside Sudoku! which is obvious)