Posted by
Andy Brown
on 15 November 2023
2022 marks the 30th anniversary of Wise Owl Training. Much has happened since we started work in a basement in South Manchester!
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 31 January 2022
Have you played Wordle yet? You should, it's great! We're a bit obsessed with it at Wise Owl so Andrew, Andy and Sam have all been working their own versions of the game in VBA, Python and Power BI(!) respectively. Check out this quick intro to Andrew's VBA version.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 31 January 2022
A modest Python program to mimic the popular online Wordle game, using a Tkinter form and some basic classes.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 28 January 2022
Can you play Wordle in Power BI? Of course you can! This blog explains how you can get Power BI to do something which it is eminently unsuited to do!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 28 January 2022
The Wordle bandwagon is rolling fast downhill, but we managed to board it. This blog shows one Wise Owl's current stats, and links to our Power BI, Python and Excel VBA versions of this web-based word game.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 20 January 2022
You can use these hidden gems to reassign or disable keys on your keyboard, detect pixel colours in a website, display a Windows short-cut key guide … and much more!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 20 January 2022
We have launched two new courses: a two-day Advanced Power BI (Reports) course for report authors, and a two-day advanced Power BI (Data) course for data modellers.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 17 December 2021
This blog shows you various ways in which you can loop over the columns of a pandas dataframe, and also explains how to loop over the rows of a dataframe (together with why you should avoid doing this!).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 17 December 2021
A summary of how to package up your Python program (including any referenced modules) into a single executable file.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 24 November 2021
Ten reasons why Python is a better programmng language than C# (and most other languages), as well as two reasons why it might not be.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 24 November 2021
To celebrate the 10th birthday of our video channel we've created this infographic, showing for example that the number of hours spent watching our videos would have covered 2,949,152 views of the first episode of Squid Game.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 24 November 2021
This blog shows how to generate a table which includes not only all of the dates in your data model, but also a range of aggregator columns such as financial year and month name for reporting purposes.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 24 November 2021
You can use SQLCMD mode to parameterise the connection, database name, table name and select columns for a query - and much more besides, as this blog explains.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 18 November 2021
Tired of doing repetitive tasks at Christmas? This blog shows you how to create a Power Automate Desktop flow to send emails out to your nearest and dearest programmatically, with each email including instructions on how they should use the gifts they've been given.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 18 November 2021
Power Automate Desktop allows you to automate any common sequence of tasks that you perform in Windows, and has the potential to change your working life. So what is it?
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 28 October 2021
To commemorate the rather dubious International Keyboard Short-Cut Day 2021 (the first Wednesday in November of each year, apparently), we offer the 10 Windows key short-cuts which will save you the most time.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 28 October 2021
In Power BI Service you can now create personal bookmarks to retain any changes you've made to filtering for a report.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 28 October 2021
Consumers of your reports can alter filters, but you can change an option to prevent these changes persisting for other users.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 28 October 2021
You can add a tab for a Power BI report within a Teams channel, and also share a report from Power BI Service within Teams - this blog shows you how to do both these things!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 08 October 2021
This blog shows how you can use Python to loop over all of the emails in a folder in Outlook, saving the attachments for each to your hard disk.