Summary: This walkthrough takes you from an empty Letter Wheel screen to a finished book interior. You will choose how many letters each wheel carries, set how many words you want the solver to find, pick a wheel or a honeycomb hive, style the page, add a title that fills itself in, and export the whole run in one pass.
Overview
Letter Wheel builds a book interior one Create at a time: a run of complete puzzle pages — letter figure and ruled answer form, laid out to suit your trim — each with its matching answer key, ready for Instant Puzzle Books or Puzzle Book Studio to assemble into a print-ready PDF.
The generator does the hard part for you. It picks a letter set that has a word using all its letters, chooses which letter to put in the middle, and then finds every word in its dictionary that uses that middle letter and only the printed ones. It keeps re-rolling until the number of answers lands in the range you asked for, so you decide how big a job each page is before you ever see one. You size a Letter Wheel by its answer count rather than by its grid, so you can grade a whole book by workload.
One layout fact to settle before you pick a trim size: the shape of the page follows the Answer lines setting on the Main tab. Right of the figure (the default) and Left of the figure both put the answer form beside the figure, which renders as a wide landscape block, roughly two to one — natural on a landscape or square page. They differ only in which side the figure sits on, which is what you want for mirrored spreads: set it per section so the figure lands on the outside edge, away from the gutter. Below the figure gives the portrait face instead: the figure centred with the form spanning the full width underneath.
If you want the solver’s side of it first, read How Letter Wheel Puzzles Work.
Required Modules
Letter Wheel — the module itself. A free demo covers every current module, so you can try the puzzle and the settings before buying — the demo makes one watermarked puzzle at a time, so the batch run and the print formats are what the paid editions add.
Standard makes the puzzle, exports the static formats (JPG, PNG, SVG and print PDF), and includes Instant Puzzle Books — a book PDF assembled straight from your current page settings. Creative adds your own word lists — the Words tab’s pangram seeds and a supplied list file — plus full design control over the page, including the hub and outer letter colours, the write-in lines and the letter font, and Puzzle Book Studio Creative (one puzzle collection, full book editing). Productivity adds Time Saver for batch runs and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity, which combines several collections into one book. Creative + Interactive and Productivity + Interactive add online play, so the same puzzles become browser games on your own site.
You can move up to a higher edition later — any higher edition, up the ladder or Interactive on top — so start with the one that fits what you are making today. See Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.
Commercial rights: Standard and Creative, and their Interactive editions, all carry the licence to sell the finished puzzle products you make — books, worksheets and printable packs — to your own readers and customers, including KDP, Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers. Productivity adds the right to sell or supply the puzzles themselves to other publishers and sellers.
Preparation
The generator supplies its own words, so there is no word list or source file to assemble first — open the module and you can generate. Decide two things up front: the output image size, which lives in the app’s own output settings and is shared by every module, and roughly how many puzzles the book or worksheet set needs. Remember that each puzzle costs two pages, not one: the puzzle page, and its answer key, which is a second full-size image rather than a line on a shared list. The book’s trim size is set later, in Instant Puzzle Books or Puzzle Book Studio.
If you want the letter sets to come from a particular subject rather than the dictionary at large, and you are on Creative or above, have that list ready as well — the Choose Your Own Letters step below explains what it can and cannot do for you.
Step-by-Step Instructions
Open the Module
Pick Letter Wheel from the puzzle list. The module screen opens with the preset buttons across the top, a quantity box, and the Main, Words, Style and Layout tabs. The puzzle itself is shaped on Main; Words holds an optional list of your own letter sets, and Style and Layout are the shared tabs you already know.
Choose the Letter Count
On the Main tab, set Letters to anything from 6 to 10; 7 is the classic wheel and the default. Seven letters is the everyday size: around two dozen answers on a typical page, a solve that fits in a coffee break, and a figure that stays large and legible even in a small trim size. Nine letters is a much longer sitting — the nine-letter example below has eighty answers, which prints as four columns of about twenty ruled rows — and it suits a puzzle-a-day book or a “champion” section at the back of a collection better than it suits a warm-up page. Six is the short end and ten letters the long one.
The number of letters is a how-many-answers dial, so move the word band with it. The bands the sizes are built around are 5–20 answers at six letters, 20–40 at seven, 30–60 at eight, 40–80 at nine and 80–200 at ten. If you change the size and leave the band alone, the run reports the reason and names the closest set it could find, so you can see which way to move the band.
Above roughly eighty answers the form keeps growing in rows, never in columns, so pair the big bands with the Below the figure answer-line face and a larger trim.
Set the Shortest Word
Shortest word decides how short an answer may be. Leave it at 4, the newspaper standard, for adult books: it keeps the answer list to real finds rather than a scattering of three-letter fragments. Drop it to 3 for children’s books and beginner pages, where the short words are the point — but raise the word band in the next step at the same time, because allowing three-letter words adds a lot of answers to every wheel.
Set the Word Count Band
Fewest words and Most words are how you size the puzzle. The generator only prints a wheel whose answer count lands between them, and quietly re-rolls the letter set until it finds one that does — so this is the single most useful control on the screen, and it is what lets you grade a book by workload rather than by guesswork.
The defaults, 20 and 40, are the seven-letter sweet spot and where most books should stay. For a gentle children’s page, try 10 to 20 — the form’s forty-line floor means a band that low leaves a lot of spare ruled lines, which suits a beginner page but looks thin on adult stock. For a nine-letter wheel, 40 to 80 gives a page that fills a landscape sheet without crowding it. If you set a band the letters simply cannot hit, the run tells you so with a message rather than silently handing you the wrong puzzle.
Choose the Figure
Figure is the drawing, not the rules. Wheel is a centre disc with the other letters on a ring around it, and is drawn at every letter count from 6 to 10. Hive is a seven-cell honeycomb with the centre letter in the middle — a distinctive look that is well worth using to set a book apart. The option is labelled Hive (7 letters only): at any other letter count the run tells you it swapped and prints a wheel.
Choose the Page
Page decides what the answer form looks like. Game prints plain ruled lines in four columns — the newspaper look, and the right choice for puzzle books. Worksheet numbers a line for every answer, so the solver can see at a glance how many are left and a teacher can mark against the key line by line. The numbering appears on the answer key too, which makes marking a class set much faster. The form always prints at least forty lines, so on a short wheel any ruled lines below the last number are spare.
Choose the Letter Reuse Rule
Letter reuse is the one setting that changes the puzzle rather than the page. Once is the standard: each letter may be used at most once per word, so the longest possible answer is exactly as long as the letter set. Unlimited lets a letter be used as often as the solver likes, which produces far more answers and words that can run longer than the figure — the same seven letters that give 24 answers under Once give 75 under Unlimited.
Once is the right default for print. If you switch to Unlimited, raise the word band with it, or the generator will keep rejecting letter sets for producing too many answers.
Fine-Tune the Letter Set
Two more controls on the Main tab fine-tune the letter set.
Difficulty — Easy, Medium or Hard — chooses how common the letters are. Easy draws the wheel’s letters from everyday words, Hard opens the pool to less familiar ones. It shapes the letter set the solver is handed, not the answer list, which is always every word those letters can make. Medium is the default and suits general-audience books.
Validate supplied words, the second control here, matters only when you have pasted your own list on the Words tab, and it is on by default. It checks each of your entries against the word list and tells you about any it had to skip, so a typo shows up as a message instead of quietly disappearing.
Choose Your Own Letters (Optional)
The Words tab, captioned Pangram seeds (N-letter isograms), is where you steer the subject matter — on Creative and above. Leave it empty and the generator draws its letter sets from the whole dictionary, which is what most books want, and is what a Standard seat does.
Paste a list, and each entry is treated as a candidate letter set — so an entry must be exactly as long as your letter count with no repeated letters. On a seven-letter wheel, KITCHEN and PLANETS work; COFFEE does not, because it repeats the E.
Your list also sets the size of the run: one puzzle per usable entry. Paste eight seeds and you get at most eight puzzles no matter what you set the quantity to, and the generator tells you the ceiling and how to raise it. Entries it had to skip do not count. An entry is dropped for the wrong length, for a repeated letter, or — with Validate supplied words on — for not being in the word list, so eight pasted words with two rejects is a six-puzzle list.
The AI word list assistant on the same tab builds that kind of list for you from a subject, and it already knows the rule: ask it for kitchen words on a seven-letter wheel and you get seven-letter words with no repeated letters. Change the letter count first and it follows. Words with no repeated letter are a minority of the language, and rarer the longer they get, so a themed request at nine or ten letters usually comes back with fewer words than you asked for — run it again, or make the themed pages as one run with the list pasted and then clear the Words tab and run the rest of the book from the built-in dictionary as a second run. A pasted list replaces the dictionary as the pool for that run rather than adding to it.
This gives you control over the letters, and therefore over the flavour of the answers, but not over the answer list itself: a wheel built from KITCHEN still accepts every word those letters make. Think of it as choosing the ingredients rather than writing the menu.
Set the Quantity
Type your quantity into the box. This is the puzzle count, not a test batch — and each puzzle is two pages, so a 120-page interior is one Create with 60 in the box. Preview always shows a single puzzle; the full run comes from Create.
One caveat if you pasted your own seeds: the list caps the run at one puzzle per usable entry, so a sixty-puzzle interior needs sixty seeds or the built-in dictionary.
No puzzle repeats inside a run: the generator tracks each wheel by its letters and its centre letter together, so it will never hand you the same puzzle twice. The same letters can come back with a different centre letter, which is a genuinely different puzzle with a different answer list — so one letter set may appear on more than one page of a long book, worth a flick through the proof if that would bother your reader. If a narrow word band leaves too few combinations to fill the number you asked for, the run reports the reason and delivers the puzzles it could place rather than repeating one; widen the band and run again.
That guarantee is scoped to the run, so generate a series in one Create and split it into volumes afterwards, rather than running each volume separately.
Style the Page
The Style tab controls how the page looks. The Font group sets the family, size and colour of every letter on the figure and every word on the answer key. The Colors group sets the page background and the cell fill behind the puzzle. The Lines group holds the cell border — it ships at width 0, so nothing draws there until you raise the width above zero.
The controls particular to this puzzle sit at the top of those same two groups. In Colors, above the background and cell fill, are Hub fill for the centre letter — it ships in amber so the required letter reads at a glance — and Outer fill for the surrounding letters. In Lines, above the Cell Border row, are Write-in line for the ruled answer lines, plus Outer border and Hub border. Thicken or darken the write-in line if you are printing small or on cream stock.
Three choices on the Main tab decide most of whether your book looks like anyone else’s — the hive figure instead of the wheel, the numbered worksheet face, and a graded band running from 10–20 up to 40–80 — and on Creative you add your own hub colour on top. Set them once and save the result as a preset from the buttons at the top of the screen. Letter Wheel keeps its own preset list, so build the house style once here and it returns on every later Letter Wheel book with one click. The full styling workflow is covered in How to Customize Puzzle Designs in Puzzle Maker Pro.
Set the Title
Titles live on the Layout tab. Smart Titles fills the title in from the puzzle’s own settings, so a hundred pages label themselves correctly without you typing a hundred titles. Letter Wheel offers:
- Custom — your own text (the default)
- Letter Wheel — e.g. “Letter Wheel”
- Letter Wheel Puzzle — e.g. “7-Letter Wheel”
- Puzzle — e.g. “Find 24 Words”
The Puzzle option is worth a look for a puzzle book: it reads each wheel’s own answer count, so every page announces its own size and the reader can pick a short one or a long one. The same list also fills the puzzle’s description field. How the control works, and how to combine it with numbering, is covered once in How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro.
The Layout tab also holds the puzzle-layout control, where the crop lives, and a Use branding toggle (off unless you turn it on) that paints your branding template onto this collection’s puzzle image.
Generate and Export
Press Create in the Create Puzzles panel. Each puzzle appears with its answer key beside it, and the run writes both to your output folder in the formats set in the app’s output settings, which are shared by every module: one bitmap format — JPG or PNG — plus SVG and print PDF if you want them. SVG is the one to keep if you expect to rescale artwork later; PDF is the one to hand to a print layout. If a band was too narrow to fill, the run says so here rather than at proof stage.
On Creative + Interactive or Productivity + Interactive, the same run also produces the web-playable version, so the puzzles you just made can go straight onto your own site as browser games.
Scale Up to a Book
At every edition, one Create with the quantity set to half your page count — each puzzle is a page plus its key — produces the whole run, and Instant Puzzle Books assembles the run into a book PDF, where you set the trim size, the margins and the page layout.
Productivity adds Time Saver, which is what you want when the book needs several different setups in one pass. Each row is a complete Letter Wheel configuration — its own letter count, word band, figure and page style — so a graded book becomes a handful of rows: a few seven-letter pages with a 10–20 band to open, the bulk of the book at the 20–40 default, and a closing section of nine-letter wheels. Run it once and every page comes out in order. Each row is its own run, so the no-repeat guarantee holds inside a row rather than across them — keep the rows on different letter counts, or on non-overlapping bands, if the whole book has to be distinct. The workflow is covered in How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver.
From there, Puzzle Book Studio sets the trim size and assembles the pages into a finished, print-ready interior — front matter, page numbering, and the answer keys collected at the back.
Outcome
You have a complete Letter Wheel run — puzzle pages and matching answer keys — where every page’s answer count sits inside the band you set, every page carries at least one word using all its letters, and no puzzle repeats inside a run. Drop it into Instant Puzzle Books or Puzzle Book Studio and it comes out as a print-ready interior.
FAQ
How many puzzles can I make in one run?
As many as the letters can supply. The generator produces a distinct puzzle for every wheel in a run, and if it cannot fill the quantity you asked for it reports the reason and delivers the puzzles it could place, so you may get fewer than you asked for rather than a repeat. On the built-in dictionary that ceiling is high enough not to matter; on a pasted seed list it is the number of usable entries.
Which edition do I need to batch-create a book?
Productivity, which adds Time Saver for running several different setups in one pass. Standard and Creative both make a whole run in one Create and both include a book route — Instant Puzzle Books on Standard, Puzzle Book Studio Creative on Creative.
Can I choose the letters myself?
Yes, on the Words tab, on Creative and above, as long as each entry is exactly as long as your letter count and has no repeated letters. That fixes the letters on the figure; the answer list is still every word those letters can make.
What if the generator cannot find a puzzle?
It tells you why rather than producing a bad page. The usual cause is a word band the letters cannot reach — most often Unlimited reuse or a three-letter minimum left running against the default 20–40 band. Widen the band and run again.
What formats can I export?
One bitmap format, JPG or PNG, plus SVG and print PDF — all at every edition, set in the app’s shared output settings. The Interactive editions add the web-playable version for online play.
Should I use the wheel or the hive?
Whichever suits the book. They are the same puzzle with the same answers; the hive is a seven-letter figure with a distinctive honeycomb look, and the wheel is drawn at every letter count.