Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 79 - July/August 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!

Your Excel probably already has check boxes, and is getting language translation functions soon too

Adding check boxes to a cell used to be a messy process, but now an elegant new tool on the ribbon reduces this to a single click. Speaking of new features in Excel, the TRANSLATE function will take any text as an input and spit it back out in one of over 100 languages, while the DETECTLANGUAGE function will tell you which language a given sample of text is written in (you can see both functions here).

You'd think after 20+ years of training on SQL we wouldn't have anything left to learn ...

It's the little things which bring the most pleasure. Did YOU know that you can hover over parts of a SQL query to see the definition of one or all columns? Or that you could create mutliple selection points, so things you type appear in two or more places simultaneously? Or that you can copy a line of SQL without selecting it? Your newsletter editor didn't know any of these!

You can skin an Excel cat in many ways, as the huge variety of answers to last month's puzzle showed

Last month's puzzle was easy enough to solve: you just had to sort a two-dimensional array by the values in another array of identical shape and size. The challenge was to find a quick and eleganrt solution. I've picked out three of the best:

Using array functions (you can nest these to give the answer in a single formula);
Using an elegant VBA solution; and
Using Alteryx (the puzzle never said you had to use Excel ...).

Congratulations to Stephen Newing of the Department for Education: out of the 32 correct answers it was his which was drawn first out of our randomised Excel sorting hat. Stephen therefore receives this month's £50 voucher, and this brief moment of fame!

Changes in the June Power BI update (there's not much to email home about)

The only change from last month's Power BI Desktop update which will affect report builders is the emergence from preview of the new home screen. Will on-object interaction ever go live?

Which periodic table elements are safe to eat? How can you repair Oreos? And much, much more ...

Any site with a diagram of the periodic table beneath the heading Can I Lick It? (Yes, You CAn?!) deserves investigation. How have we never come across the Kottke archive before now? Find out how to use the Japanese art of Kintsugi to repair Oreos, what happens if you shrink by a factor of 10 every 21 seconds, and a great deal more at this quirky and entertaining website.

This month's prize competition invites you to guess the 16 book titles depicted in our drawings

We've created clues to 16 famous book titles (2 for each of 8 authors). To enter this month's competition - with a chance of winning our £50 voucher - all that you have to do is to decipher as many book titles as you can. Your chances of winning will be proportional to the number of books you correctly identify, but every entry will have its chance in our randomised Excel sorting hat! As a special bonus, we will send back the answers when you enter the competition, so you don't have to wait until the next newsletter to find out where you went wrong.

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

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