Excel Maze
Save the file, then open in Excel. It does not work as well when you open the spreadsheet within Internet Explorer.
Excel has a lot of fancy functions that nobody uses. As a challenge, I decided to try to make an Excel spreadsheet that could create randomly-generated mazes. Here were the rules:
- No macros. Of course, it would be relatively easy to create a maze using Excel's built-in Visual Basic programming language. But most people have this feature turned off for security reasons. The hard part is getting it to create mazes using only its �native� spreadsheet functions, the kind you type inside cells to do calculations.
- Exactly one solution. What fun is it to solve a maze when there are multiple paths through the maze?
- Variable sizes. Type in a width and height to get different size mazes.
The effort was more difficult than I expected, but after many attempts using different approaches, it finally worked. You can download the spreadsheet and try it for yourself!
Limitations:
- Widths and heights are limited to 49 rows or columns. This number is arbitrary, but larger sizes would make for an even bigger file.
- The spreadsheet does not work in OpenOffice, as of version 2.0. Some of the formulas used are apparently not compatible. It does work in Excel 2000 and later.
Copyright © 2026 by Tony Isaac