Wise Owl Blogs - Home (page 1 of 24)

The March 2020 update to Power BI desktop is a full one, as this blog shows!

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 March 2020

New goodies in this month's update include the roll-out (sort of) of the new ribbon, new actions for buttons, multi-column sorting and a second axis for line charts.

This parody of mistakes you can make building a website is surprisingly funny!

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 March 2020

A website which includes help messages which don't, a password with ridiculous rules, an unhelpful timer, annoying default options for almost everything - thoroughly recommended!

The answers to our exercises are now published online (for personal use only)

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 March 2020

We receive a fair few requests asking us to publish the answers to our exercises. We have now decided to do this, on the understanding that they are for your personal use only.

Talking to Excel to fill in your input forms, using speech recognition and VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 March 2020

What happens when you combine the magic of speech recognition with the power of VBA? A user form which you can fill in without a keyboard!

Our March 2020 newsletter competition asks you to draw a picture!

Posted by Andy Brown on 12 March 2020

For the competition this month, follow the numerical instructions to draw a picture in a grid.

The answer to our February 2020 VBA competition (and its winner)

Posted by Andy Brown on 12 March 2020

We are pleased to announce that our February 2020 competition was won by Ken Warthen, whose name was the first chosen randomly out of our electronic sorting hat. This blog lists the 10 VBA mistakes Wally Owl made.

Seven apps to make my life run smoothly

Posted by Shaun Wantling on 12 March 2020

In this blog, Shaun explains the 7 apps he uses most often to manage his work and home life.

How to show rows with no corresponding data in a Power BI visual

Posted by Andy Brown on 12 March 2020

This modest blog explains how you can tell Power BI to show all of the members of a dimension table (even the ones which have no corresponding data).

The February 2020 update only contains one big change - incremental refresh

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 February 2020

The February 2020 Power BI update only really introduces one new feature - the ability to partition your data so that Power BI only needs to refresh the most recent changes.

Sam attended our first Power BI meetup at the end of January, and was impressed!

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 29 February 2020

A summary of what happened in the Power BI meet-up at the end of January, from a convert (Sam).

Find out how dynamic arrays in Excel will change your (working) life!

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 February 2020

Dynamic arrays are a new feature being rolled out in Excel 365. This blog explains how they work, and why they will make so many things in Excel easier.

Meet Matthew, our newest owl

Posted by Karen Webber on 14 February 2020

Matthew Thirlwell joined Wise Owl as a Microsoft computer trainer in November. Find out more about this newest addition to our team!

Our series of Simple Talk tutorials on using DAX within Power BI is now complete

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 February 2020

Simple Talk provide excellent how-to guides on any aspect of Microsoft software. We are proud to have contributed a series of articles explaining how to create DAX calculated columns and measures within Power BI.

Microsoft have rewritten their Edge browser to be based on the Chromium platform

Posted by Andy Brown on 06 February 2020

Microsoft have completely rewritten their Edge browser. The result is (by design) very similar to Chrome - you can even use Chrome extensions -but is probably even easier to use than Google's browser.

Office 365 ProPlus users will soon be using Bing as their default search engine

Posted by Andy Brown on 06 February 2020

Whether you like it or not, if you're running Office 365 ProPlus you will soon have your default search engine set to Bing. This article explains why this is happening, and how to get round it.

Answers to and the winner of our January newsletter competition

Posted by Andy Brown on 06 February 2020

There were only 6 correct answers to our January 2020 newsletter competition - this blog shows the completed phrases, and reveals the name of our competition winner!

February 2020 newsletter competition - spot the VBA errors

Posted by Andy Brown on 06 February 2020

Wally Owl is at it again, this time managing to make no less than 10 coding mistakes in a simple Excel VBA macro. See how many you can find (if you can spot all 10, you may win a prize!).

Our a-maze-ing Christmas day out

Posted by Karen Webber on 17 January 2020

We ended 2019 with a fun day out in Manchester. Here's what we got up to!

A placeholder for the January 2020 Power BI Update

Posted by Andy Brown on 16 January 2020

The January 2020 Power BI update isn't out yet, but we will blog about it here as soon as it is announced.

Good news for geeks the world over - you no longer need to eject USB sticks!

Posted by Andy Brown on 16 January 2020

Microsoft have changed the default Windows policy for writing to USB sticks, which means that you no longer have to worry about safely ejecting them.