Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 73 - Christmas/New Year 2023/24

The items included in this newsletter are listed below. Our newsletter go out about once a month - if you'd like to subscribe, just let us know!

You may have noticed your newsletter has changed - so too has our entire website!

We've finally got round to redesigning our website, updating every single one of the nearly 4,000 pages. We would love to know what you think of the site revamp - good or bad!

Power Automate gets a new course, a new Copilot and (regrettably) a new flow designer

We've revamped the contents of our two-day Introduction to Power Automate course and have taken the opportunity to add a new three-day fast-track Power Automate course to our schedule. Staying with Power Automate news, the new flow designer is now turned on by default - it's a shame it's so buggy and poor, even with the new Copilot. And finally in brighter Power Automate news, we've finally cracked the problem of writing a flow to delete all of your flows.

We are (sorry!) increasing our prices for scheduled courses from the start of next year

To reflect our increased costs we are (alas) increasing our prices for scheduled courses to take effect immediately (although if you book any course before Christmas 2023 we will keep to our pre-incresae prices, even if it takes place in 2024).

A summary of the changes introduced in the last three (Oct, Nov and Dec) Power BI updates

The October update didn't bring many improvements to Power BI Desktop (although you can now save reports to OneDrive and SharePoint), but the new semantic model view (with its concomitant calculation groups) will be a big change when it's released. The November update turns on button slicers and reference labels for cards by default (although both features are still in preview still), and also introduces the preview DAX query editor. The December update brings lots of formatting improvements for charts (but still no release of on-object interactions). However, we can't blog about this December update yet because the release has been pulled by Microsoft because it "hit a snag".

Some present ideas for the nerd in your life - whether yourself or someone else!

Although we are in no way affiliated with the publishers of any of these 3 present ideas, we think they'd all make good presents for the sort of person who works with data for a living (and let's face it: if you're reading this newsletter, that's probably you).

An impressive website listing 3 games that you can play in VBA: Scrabble, Monopoly and Chess

Whether you want to play chess, Scrabble or Monopoly within Excel or you want to learn about how to write programs to do this (or similar things) in VBA, this Excel VBA games site from Tom Hedge is for you!

As is (almost) now traditional, we have a seasonal quiz to entertain and - maybe - enrich you

Two years ago we had a Christmas quiz; this year it's a quiz loosely based around New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. There are 20 questions, and at the end you'll be able to enter your score into our draw (your chances of winning our £50 shopping voucher will be proportional to your score, so the better you do, the more chance you have of winning; please only submit your first attempt!). Enjoy the quiz, and have a happy and peaceful Christmas break.

Note that to keep our website content up-to-date we only publish newsletters from the last 3 calendar years.

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