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.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
StackOverflow and OpenAI have announced a partnership, but I think it's fair to say that not every StackOverflow user is sold on the idea ... !
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
If you love Excel and are also a fan of regular expressions, your Christmas has come early! And if like me you don't know how to create regular expressions, you can just get an AI tool to build them for you ...
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
The Northwest Computer Museum not only has a vast array of old hardware, software, documentation and games on displays, but allows you to interact with much of this. Time to brush up your BBC Basic programming skills?
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 June 2024
The PQ How site contains both a reference guide to the M language and lots of links and resources for articles which will help you to learn it.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 June 2024
We thought it might be useful to share the theme that we use for some of our reports, with some annoations, to give you an idea of what's possible when setting default Power BI formatting
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 June 2024
This month's bigger than average update sees new pivot table style matrix layouts, the emergence of modern tooltips, calculation groups and the DAX query pane from preview and a couple of other smaller changes.
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 09 May 2024
It's my 20th anniversary at Wise Owl this month! I'm celebrating in style with a Power BI data model and report summarising some statistics from the past two decades of teaching IT courses.
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 08 May 2024
It's the BASIC programming language's 60th birthday this month! Some of the Owls have been reminiscing about their first forays into programming and I wrote this blog as fun look back on my own experience.
