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Wise Owl blogs written by Andy Brown (page 1 of 19)
Showing blogs 1-20 (out of 364)
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
Azure Data Studio versus SQL Server Management Studio
Posted by Andy Brown on 16 January 2020
Microsoft have brought out a new SQL editor called Azure Data Studio, to act as a substitute for SQL Server Management Studio, but this owl cannot see any justification for its existence!
Introducing the new CREATE OR ALTER command in SQL
Posted by Andy Brown on 10 January 2020
From SQL Server 2016 onwards you can choose to CREATE OR ALTER a procedure, trigger, view or function, as this blog explains.
Revelations about Power BI - hiding preview and left-click drill-through
Posted by Andy Brown on 10 January 2020
When we find new features which we didn't know about, we try to share them! Did you know that you can turn preview off when getting data? Or that you could left-click to drill-through? We didn't!
How to enter the 2020 Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship
Posted by Andy Brown on 10 January 2020
Think you know Excel (or Word/PowerPoint)? Put your skills to the test in the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championships, held in California.