META (why this exists)

Compared to other puzzlehunt spreadsheet tutorials, this tutorial is an attempt to:

(try to) explain spreadsheets starting from a more fundamental level and a bit more explicitly

focus more on spreadsheets and less on solving styles or procedures

be less opinionated about specific formatting choices

But it's still opinionated about formulas, and I still mention suggestions and gotchas that I think will be nearly universally applicable.

Feel free to share widely or give me suggestions.

Look at the bottom of this page. There are multiple tabs; each is an independent sheet.

You can rename them and color them and so on. You can "hide" sheets, which will remove their tab, but they'll still be accessible through the hamburger menu.

It's a common workflow to make about one tab-sheet per puzzle in smaller puzzlehunts, but know that Google Sheets limits the number of total cells a sheet can have across all its tabs.

The limit is high, but when solving puzzlehunts on the scale of Mystery Hunt, you're liable to hit it; and navigating a spreadsheet with hundreds of tabs is no fun anyway.

I won't go into higher-level organization strategies any further here; just be aware.

FORMATTING

Cells can have lots of kinds of formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, color, font*, background color, borders, alignment, rotation... Use what you like (or what your team likes).

* yes technically I want the word "typeface" if this is intended to exclude the preceding, but you know.

One thing I'll specifically mention is that monospace fonts are often useful to help you notice patterns, particularly about the lengths of things.

Below, it's much more obvious that every word has the same number of letters in the right column compared to the left.

I am partial to Source Code Pro, but other popular monospace fonts on Google Sheets include Consolas, Courier New, and Inconsolata.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

People keep telling me about the shortcuts to make borders for cells, but I've never used them in my life. (I literally can't right now; they're bound to i3 stuff.)

Still, here they are with many other common shortcuts.

Ctrl+U: underline

Alt+Shift+5: strikethrough

Ctrl+Shift+V: paste text only, keep formatting

Ctrl+Alt+V: paste formatting only, keep text

You can also paste and then access pasting options from an ephemeral menu.

Undo. You probably know this.

"Redo", but if you haven't undone anything, it'll repeat your most recent action in the current cell. Good for repetitive formatting.

Fill down: if you've selected a range, copy the value or formula in the first cell to all cells below it

Fill right: if you've selected a range, copy the value or formula in the first cell to all cells to its right

"Select all", except that if your cursor is on a nonempty cell, it selects the bounding box of the connected group of nonempty cells. Or something like that.

After entering something into a cell, go to the next cell in column-major order. May be easier to type than arrow keys.
If you preselect a group of cells, it will go to the next cell in the group in column-major order.

After entering something into a cell, go to the next cell in row-major order. May be easier to type than arrow keys.
If you preselect a group of cells, it will go to the next cell in the group in row-major order.

When editing a formula, toggle the absolute/relative-ness of the current reference (see the bottom of the Formulas: Basic tab)

You can freeze the first X rows and/or columns of the sheet, which will make it such that they always stay in view.

You can do this from the View menu under Freeze, or by dragging the thick, dark gray bars at the corner of the sheet, left of the column headers and above the row headers.

You might use this for column/row headers or any other small-ish parts of the puzzle that you want to stay in view as you navigate the rest of the puzzle.

You can select a range to make it easy to quickly sort that range by various columns (or filter, or some other stuff; but sorting is the most useful application puzzlehunts).

The result looks like this. (Note that the first row you select will become a header and will not get sorted.)

Before doing this, or sorting in any other way, I highly recommend making a column with the original (puzzle-presentation) order so you can revert to it (without undoing other work).

You never know when you'll need that original order.

Further Resources