Excel BI - Excel Challenge 671

excel-challenges

excel-formulas

🔰 Find the pair of words which together contain all 5 vowels.

Published

March 24, 2026

Illustration for Excel BI - Excel Challenge 671

Challenge Description

🔰 Find the pair of words which together contain all 5 vowels.

Solutions

library(tidyverse)
library(readxl)

path = "Excel/671 Word Pairs Having All Vowels.xlsx"
input = read_excel(path, range = "A2:A11")
test  = read_excel(path, range = "B2:C6")

extract_vowels = function(word) {
  paste(sort(unique(unlist(str_extract_all(word, "[aeiou]")))), collapse = "")
}

result = expand.grid(input$Words, input$Words, stringsAsFactors = F) %>%
  filter(nchar(Var1) < nchar(Var2)) %>%
  mutate(combined = paste(Var1, Var2, sep = "")) %>%
  filter(map_chr(combined, extract_vowels) == "aeiou") %>%
  select(Var1, Var2)

# the same pairs, but with different order.

Logic: Read the workbook ranges needed for the challenge; Derive the required intermediate columns; Parse the packed text or string structure.
Strengths: The solution stays close to the text pattern itself, which makes the extraction logic easy to audit.
Areas for Improvement: The solution assumes the workbook layout and selected ranges remain stable, so any structural change in the sheet would require small adjustments.
Gem: A small number of well-targeted text patterns does most of the heavy lifting.

import pandas as pd
import re

path = "671 Word Pairs Having All Vowels.xlsx"
input = pd.read_excel(path, usecols="A", skiprows=1, nrows=10)
test = pd.read_excel(path, usecols="B:C", skiprows=1, nrows=5)

def extract_vowels(word):
    return ''.join(sorted(set(re.findall(r'[aeiou]', word))))

input_words = input.iloc[:, 0].tolist()

result = [
    (w1, w2) for i, w1 in enumerate(input_words)
    for w2 in input_words[i + 1:]
    if extract_vowels(w1 + w2) == 'aeiou'
]

result = pd.DataFrame(result, columns=['Var1', 'Var2'])
print(result)
# the same pairs, but with different order.

The Python version expresses the core extraction rule directly and keeps the pattern matching easy to review.

Difficulty Level

Medium

The individual steps are manageable, but the correct transformation pattern is not obvious from the raw data.