Posted by
Andy Brown
on 27 September 2024
Congratulations to Rory O'Connor of Freemans Grattan Holdings for winning last month's logic puzzle competition. Here's the answer!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 26 September 2024
Feeling stressed? Keep one of these wildlife webcams from Namibia open as you work to put everything in perspective.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 26 September 2024
Many thanks to all of those people who have kindly reviewed us on Google. We are pleased to say that we now have over 50 reviews!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 26 September 2024
This month Power BI Desktop gets a new dark mode! Visual calculations and visual level format strings have also been turned on by default (although both remain in preview, strangely).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 25 September 2024
Excel Labs is an experimental toolkit being developed as part of Microsoft Garage. This blog shows how you can use it to call AI functions, use the advanced formula editor and use an Excel-based Python editor.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 25 September 2024
Custom GPTs are mini-versions of ChatGPT tailored towards a specific task, whether this be looking up information from your company's procedures or website, subtly skewing answers to questions to meet a particular need - or just having fun!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 25 September 2024
We've now published our schedule of courses for the coming 15 months (up to the end of 2025 in fact) in a handy format convenient for bookmarking or printing.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 09 September 2024
Add report refresh date
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 07 September 2024
Not every set of data you want to import from a web page is considerate enough to exist as an HTML table. Fortunately, you can give examples of the information you want to import to have Power BI infer a table from the data on the page.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 September 2024
If you're a qualified pilot (but also a bit of a data nerd) how do you keep track of your flights? With a Power BI report, of course!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 September 2024
Announcing the winner of last newsletter's competition (and also giving the answers in case anyone is still struggling to identifiy the 16 book titles).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 September 2024
Five tribute acts played in 5 different venues on successive days of one week in September. Can you use your skills of logical deduction to work out who played which venue when, and what the capacity of each venue was? The incentive is a chance to win our monthly fifty-pound prize.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 September 2024
Most of the changes in the July and August updates to Power BI are either too insignificant to merit a write-up here or else are for features in preview. For most report-writers the ability to document DAX measures is the only change which will make much difference in these two updates.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 September 2024
Learning to use AI tools has been a journey for us, although not one which we thought would take in broccoli cats and Neanderthal film reviews. In this blog we look at the 3 best and 3 worst things we've found when using AI tools like ChatGPT.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 18 September 2024
We have always provided the best courseware, exercises and standard of training in the industry, but now we have the CPD certification to prove it!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 August 2024
In creating our two-day course on using AI tools we found a few sources of help particularly useful, and thought we'd take this opportunity to acknowlege them.
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 01 August 2024
In Excel VBA it's pretty easy to create event procedures which apply to a single worksheet or workbook. But what if you want an event to work in every workbook you open? This blog explains how to create application level event procedures in Excel VBA. You'll learn how to create a class module, how to declare application variables which support events and how to enable and disable application level events.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 09 September 2024
When using more complex measures there may be a need for each to be formatted differently. This blog shows you how to use the dynamic formatting measure feature.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 22 July 2024
Having recently compared the 4 main AI tools for text prompts, I thought I'd do the same for image generation tools. In this blog series we compare Dall-E (via ChatGPT and separately via Copilot), Firefly, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for 3 pre-defined tests to see which ones score most highly for cost, ease-of-use, speed, editing ability and above all for quality of image.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 16 July 2024
I'm sick of reading blogs pretending to explain how Large Language Models work, when the truth is that few people on earth can ever hope to understand how they are constructed. This blog is my attempt to explain as much as 99.99% of us can ever hope to understand about how AI works, and why the other bits will always remain opaque to most people.
