Posted by
Andy Brown
on 29 August 2023
If you subscribe to the Excel Beta Preview channel (and are lucky) you can now insert Python code within Excel. The rest of us may have to wait a bit for the official release, but the wait will be worth it, as this blog shows.
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 29 June 2023
Until recently, if you wanted to automate a Microsoft Excel workbook your only real choice was the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) programming language. Now, there's a new option for adding code to Excel: Office Scripts for Excel. There are many similarities between Office Scripts and VBA, as well as some significant differences. This blog provides a comparison of the two systems.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 29 June 2023
We've introduced a new (shorter) two-day Introduction to Python course, a (longer) three-day advanced course and created a three-day fast-track course for those who want a more intensive learning experience.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 07 June 2023
One of the immediate and obvious ways to use AI tools is to boost your productivity as a programmer. This blog shows how you can use ChatGPT 4 and Google's Bard to write programs in SQL, Python, VBA, JQuery and Office Script (probably the 5 languages Wise Owl use most).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 30 November 2022
This blog gives the background to Microsoft's decision to roll out Office Scripts, and explains why you might want to learn how to automate Excel using scripts, rather than VBA (and how you'd then go about doing this).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 21 June 2022
If you need to build a GUI system in Python, PyQt5 is probably the best choice, but don't take our word for it - read this blog and see what you think.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 26 April 2022
What happens when you try to defy gravity in Python, and why Excel sometimes creates worksheets with foreign names
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 28 March 2022
How can you pass a value from Power Automate Desktop to a Python script, and then get the results back? This blog explains how.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 31 January 2022
A modest Python program to mimic the popular online Wordle game, using a Tkinter form and some basic classes.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 17 December 2021
This blog shows you various ways in which you can loop over the columns of a pandas dataframe, and also explains how to loop over the rows of a dataframe (together with why you should avoid doing this!).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 17 December 2021
A summary of how to package up your Python program (including any referenced modules) into a single executable file.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 24 November 2021
Ten reasons why Python is a better programmng language than C# (and most other languages), as well as two reasons why it might not be.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 08 October 2021
This blog shows how you can use Python to loop over all of the emails in a folder in Outlook, saving the attachments for each to your hard disk.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 08 October 2021
How to solve the problem that Visual Studio Code can't find a module that you've imported.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 31 August 2021
How does Python compare with other programming languages like C#, VB or SQL? This blog looks at the differences we've come across in preparing our Python courses and videos.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 22 December 2017
Introduced in Visual Studio, string interpolation allows you to linking different C# expressions contained in curly parentheses, with everything preceded by a dollar sign. This blog explains how to use this handy new short-cut.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 26 September 2016
A short blog explaining how you can get Excel to read out values in cells every time that you recalculate a worksheet.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 23 March 2016
It's only a small thing, but … this blog shows how you can click and drag with the ALT key held down, then type to apply a table alias to lots of tables simultaneously.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 February 2016
CTEs (or Common Table Expressions) allow you to divide complicated queries up into two or more simple discrete tasks, as this blog explains.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 February 2016
It's not often that this owl learns new things about SQL when giving a course, but when I do, I like to share my new knowledge! This blog shows a new way to create aliases for columns in SQL.
