Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 September 2024
Five tribute acts played in 5 different venues on successive days of one week in September. Can you use your skills of logical deduction to work out who played which venue when, and what the capacity of each venue was? The incentive is a chance to win our monthly fifty-pound prize.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 September 2024
Most of the changes in the July and August updates to Power BI are either too insignificant to merit a write-up here or else are for features in preview. For most report-writers the ability to document DAX measures is the only change which will make much difference in these two updates.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 September 2024
Learning to use AI tools has been a journey for us, although not one which we thought would take in broccoli cats and Neanderthal film reviews. In this blog we look at the 3 best and 3 worst things we've found when using AI tools like ChatGPT.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 18 September 2024
We have always provided the best courseware, exercises and standard of training in the industry, but now we have the CPD certification to prove it!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 August 2024
In creating our two-day course on using AI tools we found a few sources of help particularly useful, and thought we'd take this opportunity to acknowlege them.
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 01 August 2024
In Excel VBA it's pretty easy to create event procedures which apply to a single worksheet or workbook. But what if you want an event to work in every workbook you open? This blog explains how to create application level event procedures in Excel VBA. You'll learn how to create a class module, how to declare application variables which support events and how to enable and disable application level events.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 09 September 2024
When using more complex measures there may be a need for each to be formatted differently. This blog shows you how to use the dynamic formatting measure feature.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 22 July 2024
Having recently compared the 4 main AI tools for text prompts, I thought I'd do the same for image generation tools. In this blog series we compare Dall-E (via ChatGPT and separately via Copilot), Firefly, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for 3 pre-defined tests to see which ones score most highly for cost, ease-of-use, speed, editing ability and above all for quality of image.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 16 July 2024
I'm sick of reading blogs pretending to explain how Large Language Models work, when the truth is that few people on earth can ever hope to understand how they are constructed. This blog is my attempt to explain as much as 99.99% of us can ever hope to understand about how AI works, and why the other bits will always remain opaque to most people.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 15 July 2024
In this blog we'll compare OpenAI's Chat GPT 4, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 and Microsoft's Copilot to see which AI tool gives the best results for different types of queries.
Posted by
Shaun Wantling
on 09 July 2024
A method for using Drill through in Power BI with multiple categories.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 July 2024
We've created clues to help you identify 16 different books (they're all well-known). The more you can guess, the greater will be your chances of winning our £50 voucher!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 July 2024
"Is the periodic table yummy? Well, it depends on the element." Any website containing this text bears further investigation. Watch the epic spaceman shrink down by a factor of 10 every 20 seconds until he's the size of an atom, find out how to repair Oreo biscuits using the Japanese art of Kinstugi and learn which elements of the periodic table you should and shouldn't eat: all (and much more) at the Kottke archives.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 July 2024
Microsoft are introducing two new functions to Excel: TRANSLATE (to translate passages of text into another language) and DETECTLANGUAGE (to determine the language in which a particular passage of text is written).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 July 2024
You can now add a checkbox to a cell with a single mouse-click. They look good, although it's hard to ensure that only one checkbox in a range is selected.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 20 June 2024
In computing it's enough to solve a problem, but as a bonus it's nice to do so in the most elegant way (although elegance is a subjective quality). This blog gives my 3 favourite ways to solve last month's Excel desert island competition.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 20 June 2024
This month's update to Power BI Desktop adds some seriously arcane functions to DAX, but it's the roll-out of the Power BI Home feature which most people will notice.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 June 2024
This month we ask you to travel to the terrifying Skull Island and find the hidden treasure buried there, armed only with some - unlikely - Excel clues
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
Apologies for making this word search slightly harder than usual - you can see the answer in this blog, as well as discover who was the lucky win of the month's prize
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 05 June 2024
We've recently published a new set of exercises for our SQL training courses based on a database of concert tours. This blog provides a brief tour of the database and how to tackle the exercises on our website, even if you haven't attended a Wise Owl training course.
