Wise Owl Blogs - Home (page 6 of 32)

You can use the new LET function in Excel to store interim formulae calculations

Posted by Andy Brown on 24 October 2020

The new Excel LET function lets you create variables to store the results of calculations, making formulae easier to read and quicker to calculate.

The answer to (and winner of) our September newsletter word search competition

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 October 2020

The winner of our newsletter competition this month is Vincent Vaughan of Public Health England, who wins a fifty-pound voucher. The word search contained all 50 states of the USA, along with a hidden quotation.

For our October 2020 newsletter competition, solve a logical puzzle

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 October 2020

Five people live in different houses, travel to work in different ways and work at different jobs. For this month's competition, all you have to do is to work out who is who!

Thie month's Power BI update includes a new logo, on-screen help and much more!

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 October 2020

There are a few good changes to Power BI Desktop this month, including a better icon and splash screen, on-canvas help (albeit pitched at too low a level) and the ability to let users tweak visuals you've published.

The 5 best things about working with Power Apps

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 September 2020

Power Apps is fun, as this blog tries to show. It consists of one owl's very personal take on the 5 best things about using the software.

A list of the 5 things one Wise Owl finds most annoying about Power Apps

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 September 2020

Any software has things you love, and things you ... don't love so much. This blog covers the latter set of things!

A review of our first 6 months of online training

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 September 2020

By the end of October we will have been providing online training for 6 months. After putting off doing this for so long, we've been surprised at how well it works - and so too have our clients, it seems.

Shaun often takes his camera when exercising, as these stunning photos show

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 September 2020

Three photos in the life of a Wise Owl trainer: a London church in the moonlight, the river Dee near Wrexham and the sun rising behind Tower Bridge.

Wise Owl Andrew Gould shares photos of wildlife taken on lockdown walks

Posted by Andrew Gould on 26 September 2020

Lockdown has forced many of us to look for wildlife closer to home - Andrew Gould has been impressed at what he's been able to see, as these photos show.

There are only two small changes in the September 2020 Power BI Desktop update

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 September 2020

You can now add total labels to a stacked or combination chart, and there are improvements to mobile layout, but in truth there's not much to get excited about for the September 2020 Power BI update.

Why the XLOOKUP function should kill off VLOOKUP and INDEX/MATCH

Posted by Andy Brown on 24 September 2020

The XLOOKUP function has at least 7 advantages over an equivalent VLOOKUP function, as this blog shows. Convert to XLOOKUP now, and then convert your colleagues!

The results of our survey on whether we should develop a Python or R course next

Posted by Andy Brown on 24 September 2020

Many thanks to everyone who voted in our newsletter survey on whether we should train in Python or R next - the results are in!

Our September 2020 newsletter competition is a word search with a missing quote

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 September 2020

Find the related missing items in our word search and the unused letters should spell out a relevant quotation - send this to us and you may win fifty pounds!

Announcing the winner of our August 2020 newsletter competition

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 September 2020

We had 19 entries for this month's competition, but despite this Matthew Palmer of Public Health England managed to win for a second month in a row. This blog gives a couple of possible solutions to the problem (warning: the blog contains disturbing images of Donald Trump).

How to save a Power Apps app to a local drive, and then open it

Posted by Andy Brown on 19 September 2020

This blog shows a simple way to export a Power Apps app without creating a solution. If you've got a fairly simple app without too many resources or data sources, it describes a much easier way to back up and restore apps than the standard export/import approach.

How to have fun pixellating and reconstructing images in VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 August 2020

You can have great fun taking your favourite image (a picture of your loved one?) and pixellating it in VBA. The results are stored as RGB numbers in a workbook - what you do with them then is up to you!

An overview of what Power Apps is and does, for beginners

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 August 2020

What IS Power Apps? In this blog we try to convey the essence of this enjoyable product, so you can make the decision of whether to invest in it.

A trainer's experience of giving the first Wise Owl classroom course in 4 months

Posted by Andy Brown on 24 August 2020

What was it like giving the first classroom course for Wise Owl since the middle of March? There were good and bad points, as this blog explains.

There are no significant changes to Power BI in the August 2020 update

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 August 2020

Notwithstanding an update blog from Microsoft, there are no interesting new Power BI Desktop features to report this month (in our humble opinon).

Our July 2020 competition was won by Matthew Palmer - here are the answers!

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 August 2020

Congratulations to Matthew Palmer for winning last month's codeword competition - here are the answers!