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Posted by Andy Brown on 25 February 2022
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March 2022 Newsletter Competition - Words in Pictures
You've received the following message from a sleeper agent in one of the repressive regimes that you monitor:
You suspect that the message contains text, and want to decrypt it. Helpfully, the agent has included the picture in this Excel workbook.
You've worked out that each cell's interior colour has a red, green and blue component, and suspect that the first two digits of these numbers (which can go from 0 up to 255) represent the letters of the alphabet, with 0 being A, 1 being B, etc.
The first cell has the colour RGB(130,140,220), which translates to letters 14, 15 and 23 in the alphabet, giving the word NOW.
Your task is to decipher the message. If you don't know VBA you can do this using Excel formulae, but you may find it useful to download this Excel workbook first (it contains a handy custom GetColour function to get at the colours used in a cell).
When you've deciphered the text, send the name of the book from which it has been extracted to this email address:
Send your answer to this email address. You're welcome to speculate on the meaning of the text!
The first correct answer pulled out of Rushi (our Randomised Unbiased Sorting Hat for Information) will win this month's £50 Amazon voucher and a modicum of fame.