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510 attributed reviews in the last 3 years
Refreshingly small course sizes
Outstandingly good courseware
Whizzy online classrooms
Wise Owl trainers only (no freelancers)
Almost no cancellations
We have genuine integrity
We invoice after training
Review 30+ years of Wise Owl
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We also send out useful tips in a monthly email newsletter ...
Not sure if we deserve all the reviews you can see on this site? Here are some of the things we do (very) differently to earn them.
How can any training company guarantee the quality of their courses? Here's how:
Our course manuals and exercises are by some way the best in the computer training industry. Fortunately you don't have to take our word for this - you can see for yourself:
Our values are simple - we treat people as we would like to be treated ourselves. So:
You can see more on our corporate values here.
We've put a lot of thought into making our online courses as useful and interactive as possbile:
Choose a specific course, or stay on this page to see all of our Programming training.
Course:
Can't see the dates/course type that you want? Create your own onsite course (and tailor the content too!).
Courses marked with an (*) are new courses (for these courses our usual no cancel guarantee doesn't apply).
If you can't see the course you want listed above, don't despair! If you can muster 3 or 4 people together, it may well be worth organising an onsite course at your office (we'll provide and set up the computers), or else an online course tailored to your needs.
Here are some comments we've received about our Programming + training. You can see all of our 510 reviews here. We would like to sincerely thank the clients whose names are shown below for kindly agreeing to let us share their feedback.
"Another excellent course delivered by Wise Owl. Thank you. Wise Owl content is always delivered in a manner that enthuses and motivates; making often complicated subjects much easier to decipher and digest. I will be using Wise Owl again."
Christopher Evans
Welsh Ambulance Services University NHS Trust
"It was highly interactive: having to type out and run the code alongside the trainer ensured that I learned how to do it (vs trying to absorb lots of theory from powerpoints!) Our trainer was very personable, and ensured that we stayed engaged throughout - not easy to do over a three day course delivered remotely!"
Myriam Telford
UK Research & Innovation (UKRI)
"Thank you so much for having me on the course. I really enjoyed it and I am sure that it will be of real benefit to my work. The trainer was great, he explained the course with patience and clarity. I cannot wait to come back for more learning with the team at Wise Owl!"
Sharlene Nair
Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons
"The trainer was great, answered a number of specific questions and expanded to explain why things worked the way they do, which really helped with my own understanding. The training was well paced with plenty of opportunities to have a go and ask questions."
Ruth Pearson
Maggie's
"A great trainer and it didn't feel like he was just reading from a script. He explained each step and showed us multiple ways to achieve the desired outcome and which methods should be used in a particular situation. He also pointed out any common problems or things we should look out for that he has experienced in his career. Other staff have already taken the course and have had positive things to say about it."
Ben Ryland
Macquarie Energy Leasing
"Our trainer was amazing! The whole team loved him. Super patient with all of us who were just using SQL for the first time. His knowledge was fantastic and he tried really hard to relate it back to our business and Data Bricks, for us which is a massive help. Everyone enjoyed the course and all feedback so far has been incredibly positive."
Jonathan Bibby
Adidas UK
We like programming! To help you choose which language to learn, we've included a quick guide below. To avoid any bias, the languages are listed in alphabetical order.
Language | When and why you would use it |
---|---|
C# | Visual C# allows you to build websites and forms-based systems in .NET. |
Office Scripts | The new way to automate Excel (and presumably in the future other Microsoft applications) using a language based upon TypeScript. |
Python | An increasingly popular language used to manipulate data, scrape websites, analyse statistics and much more besides. |
SQL | SQL allows you to extract information from SQL Server databases, and then manipulate it. |
VBA | Visual Basic for Applications is the language included in Microsoft Office, and allows you to automate Excel, Access and other programs. |
Here are the main courses that we teach in each language:
Language | Main courses |
---|---|
C# | |
Office Scripts | Introduction to Office Scripts (2 days) |
Python | |
SQL | |
VBA |
If you're not a specialist programmer, you'll probably want to avoid learning Python or C#, but becoming proficient in Office Scripts, SQL or VBA may well make you able to do day-to-day tasks more quickly, without needing to resort to getting help from your (busy) IT department all the time.
Whichever language you choose, you'll have to master the same core concepts:
Concept | Explanation |
---|---|
Variables | Variables are places in which you can store single items of data, such as integers, dates and bits of text. |
Conditions | At the heart of programming is the ability to test a condition, to see which execution path to follow. |
Loops | Also at the heart of programming is the ability to repeat a series of steps a number of times, perhaps while a particular condition is true. |
Programming has come on over the years, but the essential principles remain the same (in virtually every language you create variables, test conditions and iterate over loops). To show the evolution of programming over the decades, here are the languages learnt by the oldest of the Wise Owls:
Decade | Main language learnt | Notes |
---|---|---|
1980s | Fortran | In early Fortran you had to colour in shapes on punch cards with a 2B pencil! How times have changed ... |
1990s | VBA | The 1990s saw Microsoft roll out Visual Basic for Applications across all of the MIcrosoft Office product range; it's still going strong today. |
2000s | SQL | T-SQL is the dialect of SQL used for extracting data from SQL Server. |
2010s | C# | C, C++, Java and JavaScript are all variants of C#. |
2020s | Python | The up-and-coming language, Python allows you to write more concise code and supports lots of additional libraries. |
2030s? | ? | What will be the language we will be writing in the AI era? |
We don't train in Fortran (thank goodness), but we do still train in the languages from the other decades.
Click on any heading below to learn more.
Contact method | Details |
---|---|
Phone | Call us on (0161) 883 3606 and (within normal UK office hours) a friendly and helpful human will answer the phone! |
Send an email to our inbox and we'll aim to answer it within a couple of working hours. | |
Web | Fill in an enquiry form letting us know what you want to achieve, and we'll do our best to help! |
Skills you want to test |
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Excel VBA |
SQL (for SQL Server) |
Python |
Each tests consists of 20 questions. The tests are free and anonymous, and at the end you'll see a full analysis of your results (as well as a comparison of how well you did relative to everyone else who has previously taken the test).
We've got the following videos on our site to help you to learn Programming:
Category | Videos |
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12 |
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18 |
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14 |
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25 |
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15 |
Blog topic |
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Python |
SQL |
Visual C# |
VBA macros |
Office Scripts |
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