Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 75 - March 2024

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!

Chat GPT has spawned a host of GPTs dedicated to individual tasks - we've tested a few for you!

The main Chat GPT tool now provides a portal to a host of individual GPTs (horrible neologism!) dedicated to individual tasks. To save you having to, we've reviewed 7 of them: for playing text-based adventure games, coding in Python, creating a Pixar-style cartoon of yourself, applying space-age filters to photos, generating colouring books, getting help with board game rules and generating psychedelic pictures of animals. Enjoy!

Why our Power BI courseware revamp matters to you, and a full tutorial on the Azure Map visual

We've now finished our Power BI courseware revamp - and a huge project it was too. Read how this affects our Power BI training courses (and what the new courseware includes), or have a look at our big new blog explaining how to create, format and use the Azure map visual (which has improved hugely, and is now the only mapping visual you need - and that we will teach).

The February 2024 Power BI update adds a big new feature called Visual Calculations to preview

The only notable feature in the February 2024 Power BI update is that the Power BI Home screen is now turned on by default, but it's the new visual calculations feature in preview which has the potential to change your working life.

It's easy to create bad user interface design by mistake; much harder to get it wrong intentionally

For anyone who finds the likes of Captchas, date-pickers and volume controls irritating ... it could be so much worse. Inspired by the original Reddit intentionally bad UI design thread, here are lots of examples of terrible - if often very funny - user interfaces.

Two tricks for changing the column order in SQL queries and Power BI Query Editor

It's the little things ... ! Did you know that you can change the order of columns in the SQL Server Management Studio Results window? At least two of our trainers didn't. Or that you can reverse column order in the Power BI Query Editor by clicking and dragging? We've created a short blog to explain both of these techniques.

The winner and results from our February identify-the-Abba-songs newsletter competition

Last month we asked you to identify 5 Abba songs from some cryptic pictures. You can see the winner - and an explanation of the answers - here. Wise Owl would like to apologise for Fur Nando's.

Some examples of garden path sentences (which while grammatically correct are designed to mislead)

In a thin month for software news, I thought I'd stray slightly off-topic with some examples of garden path sentences. Reading one of these is like following wrong directions: you get halfway through your journey and realise that you've made it based on false assumptions, and that none of the directions (or words) from this point on will make any sense.

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

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