How Puzzle Maker Pro Works: From One Puzzle to a Finished Book

Summary: Puzzle Maker Pro has one workflow, and every module uses it: tune a single puzzle until you like it, generate a batch, then assemble those puzzles into printable pages or a book. This walkthrough takes you along that path once, from your first preview to a saved, reusable book project, using Standard Word Search and Killer Sudoku as the worked examples.

Overview

Puzzle Maker Pro looks like dozens of different programs, because every puzzle type has its own settings screen. It is not. Underneath, there is a single four-stage workflow, and once you have been through it you know how to drive every module in the catalogue — only the settings tab in the middle changes.

The four stages are:

Preview — get one puzzle looking the way you want, using the module’s own settings.
Create — generate the real files: puzzle images, solution images, and optionally a book.
Studio — open the assembled book, review every page, and set fonts, margins, titles and page numbers.
Time Saver — turn stage 1 into a list of rows, so one Create builds a whole graded set instead of one batch of near-identical puzzles.

You do not need all four. Stages 1 and 2 alone give you printable pages in about five minutes, which is exactly where a first session should stop:

Open a module and type or load a word list.
Click Next Preview until you like what you see.
Set Quantity to 3.
Click Create.

Your puzzle images and matching solution images are in the project folder, ready to print. Everything below adds control and scale to those four clicks.

Required Modules

Puzzle Maker Pro plus at least one puzzle module. This tutorial uses two, because they show the two shapes the Time Saver screen comes in: Standard Word Search and Killer Sudoku. Any module you own follows the same four stages.

A free demo covers the preview, create and book steps, so you can learn the shape of the workflow before buying. Demo output is watermarked and generates one puzzle at a time. The batch step comes with a Time Saver licence, so try that stage once you have one.

What each edition adds to this workflow.

Making puzzles, exporting the static formats (JPG, PNG, SVG, print PDF and PowerPoint) and Instant Puzzle Books — a book assembled straight from your current page settings, with no per-page setup — come with every edition.
Creative adds full design control over the puzzle (for Standard Word Search, shaped grids through the mask editor; for Killer Sudoku, the Style tab including coloured cages) and Puzzle Book Studio Creative, the complete book editor working on one puzzle collection.
Productivity adds Time Saver for batch runs, Puzzle Book Studio Productivity for combining several collections into one book, and JSON export. Which editions a given module sells is on its own product page — some start at Creative. You can move up to a higher edition later, so start with the one that fits what you are making today — see Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.

Commercial rights: every edition carries 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 generated puzzles themselves to other publishers and sellers.

Preparation

Two decisions are much easier to make once than to redo halfway through a book.

How many puzzles you need. The arithmetic is one puzzle page plus one solution page, so a 100-page book interior is roughly 35 to 45 puzzles once the title, copyright and contents pages are counted. Put several solutions on one page in the layout settings and the same 100 pages hold more. For a classroom, the units are smaller: a week of morning-work sheets is 5 to 10 puzzles, and a Teachers Pay Teachers pack is usually 10 to 30.

Your trim size — the finished page size you are publishing at. It drives margins, how large the grid can be, and how much fits beside it, and changing it later re-flows every page. Set it under Settings → Instant Puzzle Books → Book Layout and Composition → Page Trim Size and Margins. Puzzle Book Studio’s Book Settings button opens the same settings, so either door writes the same trim size.

One habit worth forming now: give each book its own project folder. Twenty books sharing one folder is how a series ends up with a bad proof.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Get One Puzzle Right

Pick Standard Word Search from the puzzle list. The module screen opens with a preset toolbar and a quantity box at the top, and a row of tabs: Puzzle, Grid, Options, Solution, Style, Stats and Titles. The preview panel on the right is where you will spend this stage.

Start on the Puzzle tab, on its nested Words tab. Leave Type Word List selected and type your words, one per line. If you already keep word lists as text files, switch to Word List File (.txt) and point at one instead. Then click Next Preview.

That first preview is the whole point of this stage. Change one thing, click Next Preview again, and watch what it does:

Grid tab — Rows and Columns set the grid size, anywhere from 5 to 200 each, starting at 10 × 10. Words longer than the grid’s longest side are skipped, so a 10 × 10 grid quietly drops a 12-letter word. If words go missing, look here first.
Options tab — the placement algorithm (Default, Compact, No Shared Letters or Use All Words) changes how tightly words pack together. Diagonals, Backwards, Kid’s Diagonal (Top Left – Bottom Right) and Allow Overlapping Words change which directions are in play, and between them they set how hard the puzzle is. As a starting recipe: young solvers get a 10 × 10 grid with none of these ticked; middle grades get Diagonals, or Kid’s Diagonal (Top Left – Bottom Right) if a single consistent diagonal is friendlier; confident solvers get Backwards and a larger grid.
Style tab — fonts, colours, borders and canvas.

Word search placement is random, so Next Preview on unchanged settings still gives you a different grid. That is worth knowing rather than working around: for word searches and mazes especially, clicking through a few previews and keeping the one you like is a normal part of the job.

Use the Puzzle / Solution / Both radio buttons under the preview to choose what you are looking at. For a word search the solution view is genuinely useful — it shows you where the words landed. For a sudoku it rarely tells you anything, so leave it on Puzzle.

Need one worksheet for tomorrow and nothing else? Save Preview writes the puzzle you are looking at and its solution straight to disk — along with its word list, and an SVG pair if you have SVG switched on — or Create 1 or more puzzles, without using Instant Puzzle Books

Set the Title

Titles live on the Titles 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, and the same option set feeds the puzzle description. The options each module offers differ; the workflow does not. It is covered once in How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro.

When a look is working, save it as a preset from the buttons at the top of the module screen. Presets are how a style becomes a one-click decision on the next book, and they are what Time Saver builds its rows from later.

Produce Your First Real Output

Previews are throwaway. Create is what writes files. First decide what you want out of this run: loose puzzle pages to print, or a bound book.

For loose pages, leave Create Instant Puzzle Book unticked, set Quantity, and click Create. You get numbered puzzle images and matching solution images in the project folder — one puzzle per file, ready to print or drop into a worksheet. That is the whole path for classroom handouts and printable packs.

For a book, tell Puzzle Maker Pro what kind first. Click the Settings button at the top right of the main window and open Book Output Settings. Tick Create Powerpoint File. This setting is remembered between sessions, so it is a once-only step.

The same panel holds the other book formats, in two groups: Fixed Output (Create Full Page Images, Create PDF from Pages) and Editable Output (Create PDF from Puzzles, Create Powerpoint File, Create Interactive PDF, Create Interactive PowerPoint). PowerPoint is the friendliest first choice for reviewing a book, because you can open it and page through it. For the file you actually upload to a print service, use Create PDF from Puzzles for the sharpest type, or Create PDF from Pages if your design relies on effects that need flattening. The two interactive formats are ordinary book outputs written alongside their static twins, with a clickable table of contents.

Then, on the main window:

Set the Quantity on the module screen. Start with 1 or 2 while you are checking the look; once it is settled, use the puzzle count from your page budget.
Tick Create Instant Puzzle Book.
Click Create.

You get a PowerPoint file containing your puzzles, laid out as book pages. On the Tools tab, Open Project Folder shows you where everything landed, and Open PDF/PPT After Create makes the finished book open by itself at the end of every run.

One control on that screen deserves a moment: Clear Project Folder Before Create empties the output folder before generating. With it on, a new run wipes images that an earlier saved book project still points at; with it off, the next book inherits the last one’s puzzles. Neither is wrong — but pick deliberately, and give each book its own folder.

That is Instant Puzzle Books: a finished book assembled directly from your current settings — trim size, margins, layout — with every puzzle treated the same and no page-by-page work. It is the fast route, and for a straightforward book of one puzzle type it may be all you ever need.

You now have a working pipeline. The same three clicks with a real quantity produce the interior you upload.

Review the Whole Book in Puzzle Book Studio

Click Open Studio. (Tick Open After Create and it opens automatically at the end of every Create.)

Puzzle Book Studio is the book editor: the same puzzles, but now as pages you can look at and change. The window has three parts.

On the left, two synced views of the same book. Book Structure lists it page by page, front matter first. Puzzle Sets lists it by collection and puzzle. Click something in either and the other follows.

In the middle, the page preview. The View control offers 1 Page, 2 Pages and Spread. Spread is the default and the one to check before you print or upload, because it pairs the pages that genuinely face each other in print — (2,3), (4,5) and so on, with page 1 opposite a blank. Printing single-sided worksheets instead? Switch to 1 Page, which is what will actually come out of your printer. Move around with Prev / Next or by typing a page number.

On the right, properties for whatever you selected. For a puzzle: Title, Description, and Hide in puzzle book to drop one page without regenerating anything. For a collection: Hide in puzzle book again, plus Limit puzzle count to cap how many of its puzzles the book uses.

The Book Settings button is where the book itself is defined: page trim size and margins, page layout, page numbering, Content Pages (title page, copyright page, table of contents), Puzzle Book Typography and Puzzle Area Settings. Typography looks daunting and is not — set the puzzle title font and four of the others (solution title, description, word list and page number) follow it automatically, which for most books is the only typography decision you need to make. The title page’s Main Title Font and the Table of Contents Font are set separately, because those are book-level rather than puzzle-level.

Two settings in here are much easier to get right before you generate than after. Puzzle Area Settings → Show page cross-references prints “Solution 12 on page 87” under each puzzle and “Puzzle 12 on page 5” under each solution — the feature that makes a long puzzle book usable, and clickable in the two interactive formats. It is off by default, and switching it on reserves a footer band inside every puzzle slot, so the puzzle area shrinks. And the copyright page under Content Pages is the one readers expect and the one you least want to add after a proof.

The book rebuilds itself about a second after your last edit, so you can change a setting and watch the preview catch up. Rebuild Book is there as reassurance and as the retry if a rebuild fails. If anything needs attention — a word list that does not fit, a puzzle image that has moved — a Warnings panel appears. Clicking a warning takes you to the page it is about, or, when a puzzle image has moved, opens the dialog that re-points it.

The shuffle buttons reorder the book — Within Sets, Entire Book, or Restore Original Order — which matters when you want difficulty mixed rather than climbing.

Save Project and Restore Project write the book to a .pmpbook file: the project and its layout, with the puzzle images referenced by path rather than stored inside it. So archive the project folder alongside the .pmpbook. If the images do move, a missing-asset warning opens Resolve Missing Puzzle Files, whose Locate Folder… button re-points a whole folder in one pass.

When the book is right, Output Settings and Render Book produce the final files. Rendering runs in the background with a page counter on the status line, and the same button cancels it. Before you order a proof, read the total page count off the book — spreads and front matter can add a filler page, and a print interior normally has to end on an even one.

Which Studio you get depends on your edition: Creative gives you the full editor on one puzzle collection, Productivity the same editor across several collections combined into one book.

Scale Up with Time Saver

Everything so far generates puzzles from one set of settings. A real book usually needs several: easy pages at the front, harder ones at the back, a different word list per chapter, two grid sizes.

Time Saver is how you describe all of that at once. Each row is one complete generation setup — its own preset, its own quantity, its own settings — and one Create runs every row in order. Tick Use Time Saver on the main window and Create uses your rows instead of the single settings screen; untick it and you are back to normal generation. Time Saver comes with Productivity.

(Without it you can still build a graded set by hand: Create your easy settings with New Book selected, change the difficulty, then Create again with Current Book selected. Three runs, one book, three levels.)

The shared Time Saver screen is a grid with a row per setup:

Puzzle Type — which module the row generates. This column appears only where the module allows rows from more than one module; where it does, you can genuinely mix puzzle types in one run, which is what the Multi-module Time Saver name refers to. Killer Sudoku allows it.
Preset — the saved settings the row starts from. This is where the presets you saved earlier come back.
Word List — for modules that take one; other rows show N/A.
Quantity — how many puzzles this row produces.
Settings Summary — a short description of the row’s settings, and it is clickable: click it and the module’s full settings dialog opens, with a preview, for that row alone. Save and the summary updates.
Modified — a read-only flag telling you the row carries its own settings rather than just following its preset. Rows from Add Rows (Select Presets) stay unmodified until you edit them; rows from Add Row arrive flagged, because they carry their own copy of the settings from the start.

Build rows with Add Row, which adds as many rows as the Rows box beside it says, each on the selected type’s default preset; Add Rows (Select Presets), one row per preset you tick — the quickest way to turn six saved styles into a six-row batch; or Add Rows (From Word Lists), which turns each .txt word list you select into its own row.

The buttons under the grid are the day-to-day controls, and they are worth knowing by name: Row Up and Row Down reorder, Copy Below and Copy to End duplicate a row you have just tuned, Shuffle Rows mixes the order, Delete Selected and Delete All clear rows, and Refresh Presets re-reads the preset list after you save a new one. The preset toolbar above the grid saves and reloads the whole row list — the same save and open icons you use on the module screen — so a book’s batch recipe is reusable.

Some modules add Add Progression, the single biggest time-saver here. On Killer Sudoku it asks for a number of steps, a grid-size range (6 × 6 or 9 × 9) and a difficulty range across the seven levels — Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, Tough, Extreme — then builds the entire easy-to-hard ladder of rows in one dialog. The ramp covers the Easy through Tough bands. Six steps at ten puzzles each gives sixty graded puzzles, which with solutions and front matter is roughly a 130-page interior.

The Word Search Time Saver is a per-module screen and looks different, because word searches need more per row. Alongside quantity, each row carries its own word list and its own Number of Words, and can switch between a preset, a mask (a shaped grid) and a plain rectangle. Diagonals and backwards are set per row, so one run can produce gentle orthogonal-only pages and hard multi-direction ones. You can merge several word lists or keep them separate, tick 1 Puzzle for Each Word List to cap a row at one puzzle per list, and have a row keep going until its words are used up. It has its own preset folder, so word search batch recipes save and reload independently.

Both screens end the same way: tick Use Time Saver, click Create, and every row generates in one pass — followed by the book, if Create Instant Puzzle Book is ticked.

Putting the Four Together: A Real Book

A book with two puzzle types — say word searches in the first half and killer sudokus in the second — puts all four stages in one run:

Generate the first collection: set up the word search Time Saver rows, then Create with New Book selected.
Generate the second: switch to Killer Sudoku, set up its rows, and Create with Current Book selected, so the new puzzles are added to the same project rather than starting a fresh one.
Open Studio. Both collections are in the Puzzle Sets tree.
Set the book up once in Book Settings: trim size and margins, page numbering, and under Content Pages a title page, a copyright page and a table of contents.
Page through it in Spread view. Hide anything you do not want, cap a collection with Limit puzzle count if it overshoots the page budget, and check the total page count.
Save Project to a .pmpbook file, in the same folder as the images.
Render Book.

Combining several collections into one book is a Productivity feature; on Creative, build one collection per book.

Step 6 is the one people skip and regret, because it is what makes the next book cheap: restore the .pmpbook, hide or remove the old collection, run Create with Current Book selected to add the new puzzles, then Render Book.

Outcome

You have printable pages or a finished book and, more usefully, a repeatable process: presets that hold your styling, Time Saver rows that hold your batch recipe, and a .pmpbook project that holds your book design. The next book is a matter of loading those three things and swapping the content.

The four stages are the same in every module. Moving from word search to killer sudoku, or to mazes, or to nonograms, changes only what the settings tab contains — Preview, Create, Studio and Time Saver behave exactly the same way.

FAQ

Can I print one puzzle per page instead of building a book?

Yes, and it is the shorter path. Leave Create Instant Puzzle Book unticked and click Create: you get one image per puzzle and one per solution in the project folder. For a single sheet, Save Preview writes just the puzzle on screen and its answer key.

How do I make the same word list at three difficulty levels?

Generate it three times, changing the difficulty between runs — use New Book for the first and Current Book for the rest, so all three land in one project. On Productivity, put the three settings in three Time Saver rows and one Create does all of it.

What is the difference between Instant Puzzle Books and Puzzle Book Studio?

They produce the same output formats and use the same renderer; they differ in working style. Instant Puzzle Books is settings-then-build: you configure once and it assembles the whole book unattended. Puzzle Book Studio is a live editor: you see every page, edit titles, hide puzzles, adjust fonts and layout, and watch the book rebuild as you go.

Where do my generated files go?

To the project folder. Click Open Project Folder on the Tools tab to see it, or tick Open Project Folder after puzzle creation on the File and Folders tab to have it open by itself.

Why does the same word search look different every time I click Next Preview?

Word placement is random, so each preview is a fresh grid even with identical settings. That is deliberate — click through several and save the one that looks best. Mazes behave the same way.

Which edition do I need to batch-create puzzles?

Time Saver comes with Productivity, which also combines several puzzle collections into one book; Creative gives you the full book editor one collection at a time. You can move up later, so the edition you start on is not a decision you are stuck with.