Here are the results to the Excel Word Challenge I posted a couple of weeks ago. The Winner is:
Shan Fenderson with CERAMBYCIDAES at thirteen letters
When the MVPs were devising this game, I bet that we would get one 10-letter word and that would be it. But Shan proved me wrong. In order to be crowned King of Excel Word Challenge, Shan has to use the word in everyday conversation today. Good luck with that.
Andy Pope wins the second part of the contest by submitting these functions to test whether a word can be made from Excel column letters. He wins by default since no one else submitted any code. But that shouldn’t detract from his wonderful functions. Very smart using recursion, I hadn’t even thought of that. Here’s what I came up with for a function.
Honarable mention goes to John Walkenbach for A-E-G-I-L-O-P-S. Only eight letters, but all single letter columns. The longest word I could find that only uses single letter columns was six characters. There were about a dozen of them including CHIMPS, CHINOS, BIJOUX, and GHOSTY.
Below is a list of words over 10 letters that I got from an online dictionary.
| ARCHEGENESIS | 12 |
| BACTERICIDIN | 12 |
| CHLORANEMIA | 11 |
| CHLORANEMIC | 11 |
| DISACCREDIT | 11 |
| PSYCHEDELIA | 11 |
| PSYCHEDELIC | 11 |
| WAVELENGTHS | 11 |
And here’s some words that were submitted that I like, but which weren’t long enough to win
| Salamanca | (submitted by onedaywhen) |
| Begrudged | (Peo) |
| Degraded | (Todd) |
| Barbecued | (rzf) |
| Macadamia | (John W.) |
Congratulations Shan, Andy and John.
Via live internet connection from the UK….
[acceptance speech]
THANK YOU, THANK YOU!
Well what can I say.
It was great fun working on this project
I said to my guys as soon as I saw the spec, ‘I got to do this!’.
And you know I still wasn’t sure I’d won until Dick opened that envelope, even if mine was the only entry.
I have to thank all the people who made this possible and if I miss anybody out you can blame it on the excitement.
To the MVP’s who so selfeshless endured hours of drinking Rock-Bottom Red in order to bring this idea to life.
To Dick for hosting the whole show, Great Job Dick!.
To my wife for putting up with me whilst I worked on those functions.
And finally to my kids who missed out on all those family trips to the park whilst I spent a Sunday afternoon refining my code.
Thank you.
[/acceptance speech]
Cheers
Andy