Posted by
Andy Brown
on 11 December 2024
Microsoft have announced the next version of their editing environment for SQL Server Management Studio, including the integration of Copilot and (finally) a dark theme.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 11 December 2024
Microsoft have announced the preview availability of SQL Server 2025, complete with the new vector field. This blog explains what a vector field is, and why you might need it.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 11 December 2024
Last month we asked you to come up with a series of Power Query transforms to massage some data into football league format, and only three people answered the call!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 10 December 2024
In what is becoming a Christmas tradition, here are a few suggestions for things to buy the nerd in your life (you?) for Christmas this year.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 10 December 2024
How good is the new ChatGPT voice mode? Listen to this six-minute conversation and you'll realise that life will never quite be the same again. I genuinely don't think this is exaggerating!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 09 December 2024
For our newsletter competition this month everyone gets one shot only at creating a perfect image in Dall-E. This blog takes a behind-the-scenes look to explain the nuts and bolts of how we used the OpenAI API to get this to work.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 09 December 2024
Now that Microsoft have finally ironed out most of the bugs from the new flow designer in Power Automate, we thought we'd share this blog on how to automate your email Christmas card procedure!
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 09 December 2024
In an SSRS report you can display images stored in an external location. This blog explains how to show images from both the report server and external websites in your SSRS reports.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 December 2024
Last month we blogged in detail about the new GROUPBY and PIVOTBY functions in Excel. This month we have 4 lighter new features: focus cells, colour pickers, Draw and Hold and some new templates.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 December 2024
This month sees a few new preview features (of which we've chosen to highlight list and text slicers), but only two release changes: paths in Azure maps, and the ability to create new measures in DAX queries.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 December 2024
Not before time, we've updated our Power BI Desktop skills test to the latest version. It's interesting to look back at the original test to see just how much has changed!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 December 2024
A new single page summarising planned improvements to visuals and other display items in Power BI Desktop
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 04 December 2024
In SQL Server Reporting Services, storing images on a report server provides a convenient way to display pictures in a report. Uploading images one-by-one is tedious so this blog shows you one way to upload multiple images at the same time, including how to organise the files into different folders.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 02 December 2024
Icons can add a little extra something to your reports. Working out how to do this using JSON files is tricky and in this blog we will cover how!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 November 2024
We've silently added a fair few blogs on Power BI in the last couple of months - this short blog gives a useful index to them.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 November 2024
You can now create data-bound reference layers in Azure maps, document your model's measures, tables and columns using the INFO.VIEW function in DAX, format chart markers within inches of their lives and apply dynamic formatting using DAX.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 November 2024
This blog gives a practical example of using the new Excel PIVOTBY function to create a dynamic pivot table (one where you can choose the row, column and data fields from drop lists).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 November 2024
The new PIVOTBY function in Excel allows you to create a pivot table with a dynamic formula. Does this mean that the pivot table is redundant?
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 November 2024
Rachel has created two custom GPTs allowing you to get any information on our courses and services. You can use either of these as intended (to get course details, dates, venues or prices) or to give you ideas for how you could implement a similar search GPT within your own organisation.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 November 2024
Google are right to worry about the safety of their current virtual monopoly on search, with breaking news on new desktop search versions of AI tools from ChatGPT and Claude.