Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 82 - November 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!

Do the new Excel PIVOTBY and GROUPBY functions mean that pivot tables are no longer needed?

If there's one characteristic shared by our readers, it may be an enduring affection for the not-so-humble Excel pivot table. But now that Microsoft have rolled out the new GROUPBY and PIVOTBY functions, is the pivot table still needed? Read about the syntax and capability of these two new functions, see an example of creating dynamic pivoted data using PIVOTBY and read our take on the pros and cons of using PIVOTBY versus a more conventional pivot table.

With new AI desktop search, should you stop using Google? Plus the creepiest AI tool we've seen ...

ChatGPT and Claude have announced desktop search apps. You can install the ChatGPT one as a browser extension to replace Google - but should you? While on the subject of AI, a web page which generates a photo-realistic picture of the face of a different person every time you refresh the page is somehow the creepiest use of AI we've seen so far.

Need any information on our training? Rachel has trained a custom GPT to give you the answers!

Rachel has created two GPT search facilities that you can use to get any information that you want about the types of training we deliver, when our courses run, what we cover and much more. There are two good reasons to try these out: it's by far the easiest way to get information about everything we do, and it might give you ideas for how your own corporate GPT could work. Make that three, actually: it's fun!

How to use ChatGPT to create a quiz - shameful secrets from our last competition

Did you enjoy last month's quiz? Maybe you appreciated the quirky Wise Owl humour? Sorry, folks: for the first (and last?) time we used AI tools to set the questions, create pictures where necessary and come up with plausible alternative answers. You can see the prompts we used for this case study of using ChatGPT here (and if you're more interested in content than process, you can see here an analysis of the results, together with the name of the lucky winner).

The October 2024 Power BI update includes some nice new features, such as filled shape Azure maps

The October 2024 Power BI Desktop update includes data-bound reference layers in Azure maps (so you can colour regions differently according to how many sales each made, for example), as well as improvements to marker formatting, model documentation and dynamic formatting using DAX. We've been doing updates of our own for Power BI too, having added 7 blogs and 27 tips recently.

This month's competition - test your Power BI data transform skills on our football league results

One of the fun things about setitng challenges like this one is seeing the ingenioius ways people will find to solve them! This month you have been given an Excel spreadsheet showing the final scores from a football league, and you are asked to transform this data in Power Query to produce a final league table. As always there is a £50 voucher, fame and kudos to be won by the lucky successful competition entrant whose name is drawn first out of our randomised sorting hat.

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

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