Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 July 2024
"Is the periodic table yummy? Well, it depends on the element." Any website containing this text bears further investigation. Watch the epic spaceman shrink down by a factor of 10 every 20 seconds until he's the size of an atom, find out how to repair Oreo biscuits using the Japanese art of Kinstugi and learn which elements of the periodic table you should and shouldn't eat: all (and much more) at the Kottke archives.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 20 June 2024
In computing it's enough to solve a problem, but as a bonus it's nice to do so in the most elegant way (although elegance is a subjective quality). This blog gives my 3 favourite ways to solve last month's Excel desert island competition.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 June 2024
This month we ask you to travel to the terrifying Skull Island and find the hidden treasure buried there, armed only with some - unlikely - Excel clues
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
Apologies for making this word search slightly harder than usual - you can see the answer in this blog, as well as discover who was the lucky win of the month's prize
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
StackOverflow and OpenAI have announced a partnership, but I think it's fair to say that not every StackOverflow user is sold on the idea ... !
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
The Northwest Computer Museum not only has a vast array of old hardware, software, documentation and games on displays, but allows you to interact with much of this. Time to brush up your BBC Basic programming skills?
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 09 May 2024
It's my 20th anniversary at Wise Owl this month! I'm celebrating in style with a Power BI data model and report summarising some statistics from the past two decades of teaching IT courses.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 08 May 2024
You can now add Copilot to your 365 licence, although it isn't cheap - this review looks at whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 May 2024
Congratulations to Samantha Wareham of Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust for winning our Easter quiz (out of the 47 answers received, hers was the entry chosen by our randomised Excel sorting hat). You can see some further analysis of the answers in this blog.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 May 2024
Our grid contains 24 hidden thematic treats. Once you've found them all, the unused letters will spell out a message. Email this to us and you have a change of winning a £50 voucher!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 May 2024
We've created two new sections in our website: to house full-blown tutorials and (at the other extreme) short tips.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 April 2024
The Ajelix Excel AI tool claims to help you generate formulae in Excel - so we put it to the test
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 April 2024
Microsoft would much prefer it if everyone switched to a subscription model for Office licensing, but they aren't abandoning the sale of standalone software applications just yet.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 April 2024
How one determined person embedded the published ChatGPT 2 source code and weightings within an Excel workbook to give an insight into how AI works
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 April 2024
Want a complete list of all of the AI tools available for you to use? Here's a website which lists 32 tools just for sarcastic conversations alone!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 April 2024
Don't consider yourself to be musical? Think again! Now everyone can unleash their inner Taylor Swift, using the Suno plug-in within Copilot.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 27 March 2024
While doing a thorough site audit we came across some pages which we no longer link to, but which we don't want to lose. This blog ensures that you (and Google) can still get to them!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 March 2024
Last month we asked you to identify 5 Abba songs from cryptic pictures. Out of 16 correct entries our randomised sorting hat chose the name of Alison Palmer of Devon Council, who wins a £25 voucher. An explanation of the answers follows!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 March 2024
A review of websites whose UI is bad by design (and often very funny as a result), including hard-to-use Captchas, irritating volume controls and date-pickers designed to exasperate.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 March 2024
There's a famous sentence which reads "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana". It turns out that this is just one example of a sentence deliberately designed to lead you up the garden path ...