Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 76 - April 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!

View or download our newly published schedule of courses for the next 12 months

We've now published our schedule of courses until the end of March of next year - you can see a summary of these dates as a four-side downloadable PDF or on our website. Although we don't guarantee that dates won't change, we do (virtually) guarantee that if you book a place on a course it WILL run (and don't forget that you can also book a tailored training course at your site, or one-to-one consultancy).

Try an amazing new AI tool which will write songs for you, or search a list of over 13,000 AI apps

The incredible Suno tool is a plug-in for Microsoft's Co-pilot app (which currently runs free of charge on Windows computers). Your newsletter editor used it to generate a Country & Western ballad from his cat and a Heavy Metal cry of anguish about Excel formulae (along with 3 other songs in different styles). Prepare to be amazed. Staying on the subject of AI tools, here's a searchable site giving access (at the time of writing) to 13,109 specialist AI tools, although who's to say which of them will turn out to be useful?

Excel news: the next standalone version, an AI tool to write formulae and an embedded ChatGPT model

Curious about how AI works? You could always download an Excel workbook which contains the whole of version 2 of ChatGPT and work the algorithm out yourself. If that sounds too much like hard work, you could ask this dedicated AI tool to help you to write your Excel formulae. And finally on Excel, Microsoft have announced that they will continue to release standalone versions of Office - at least for now - with Office 2024 about to be released in preview.

The new Power Automate flow designer continues to provide unexpected surprises!

Pity the poor Wise Owl trainer (currently Sam or Andy) who has to teach people how to use Power Automate. A few months ago Microsoft introduced a new flow designer, from which we think it's fair to say that not every wrinkle was ironed out! You can see how to circumvent 5 of the most egregious bugs in this blog.

The March 2024 Power BI update, and a summary of the current state of play of on-object interaction

The March 2024 Power BI update includes some minor changes to data bars in tables and matrices and even more minor changes to data label formatting; the new DAX-free row-level security editor is also now turned on by default. However, on-object interaction remains stubbornly stuck in preview. Because it's been evolving in limbo, we're written a fresh blog on the current differences you'll see when (if?) this feature emerges from preview.

An Easter quiz - 20 questions to entertain you in your lunch hour, and maybe win you a cash prize

Our traditional Easter quiz is a tiny bit late this year! As always some of the questions are challenging, but we've worked hard to make the quiz fun and interesting. When you've answered all of the questions you'll be able to see how well you did (and see the answers to questions that you got wrong),and you'll also be able to type in your email address to get the chance to win our £50 Amazon (or other) voucher. We won't use this email address for any other purpose, and your chances of winning will be proportional to how many questions you get correct.

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

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