1. Mathias Kools
2. Advent of Code 2021 in Spreadsheets

Advent of Code 2021 in Spreadsheets

Advent of Code is “an advent calendar of small programming puzzles”. Each puzzle comes with an example input and output. The site generates a unique challenge file⁰ for each user, and rewards them for solving it.

Programmers race on time to get onto a global leaderboard. I’m more interested in racing towards the bottom of technology stacks. I want to answer the question, can you do a full advent of code calendar in Google Sheets¹?

I encourage you to browse the advent of code challenges. Each puzzle gets a story fitting the advent of code lore.

Rules

Solving “in Google Sheets” is too permissive. Google Sheets provides functionality to write JavaScript.

• Scripts in Google Sheets are NOT allowed.
• Interesting work needs to be done with cell formulas.
  • Cleaning input is NOT interesting.
    • For example if data is randomly spread across multiple lines.
  • Getting data into the spreadsheet is NOT interesting.
    • For example if an “ASCII map” of characters is the input. Getting each character to a distinct cell is not the interesting part of the problem.

Progress*