Wise Owl's news tweet | Issue 97 - July 2026

The items included in this newsletter are listed below. Our newsletter go out about once a month - if you'd like to subscribe, just let us know!

Introducing our new range of bite-sized courses for the time-poor but curiosity-rich

We've decided to experiment! We are launching a range of bite-sized courses:

Subject	Number of courses
Bite-sized Excel	8 (including charts, pivot tables, lookup functions and more)
Bite-sized Power BI	5 (including bookmarks, filtering and calculated columns)
Bite-sized SQL	2 (setting criteria and creating joins)
Bite-sized AI	1 (creating images and videos)

We're excited to try this idea out, and have scheduled morning (09:30 to 12:00) and afternoon (13:00 to 15:30) courses throughout the Summer months.

Apart from being shorter, the courses will be just like our full-length ones (so you'll get a PDF of the course manual to copy onto your machine, a free separate pre-course test to establish that you'll be able to connect correctly on the day and a friendly Wise Owl trainer who'll be able to see your screen throughout your course, and nudge you in the right direction where appropriate).

A SQL formatter tool is now part of Management Studio ... and news of our new Oracle SQL course

Too tired to indent your code? Let the new built in SSMS preview formatting option do it for you:

You can right-click on your code and choose this option to lay it out professionally.

While on the subject of SQL, we've now added a two-day Introduction to Oracle SQL course to our stable, meaning that we now train in all of the main SQL dialects (SQL Server, Postgres, Snowflake and Oracle).

A look at some of the most exciting new features released in Power BI in the last couple of months

Here 's our take on the most exciting features introduced into Power BI for report creators in the last couple of months:

Shape maps

DAX functions

Custom totals in visuals

Sentence tooltips

Click on the link below each image to see a detailed blog explaining what each feature is, and how to use it.

Two new free lunchtime webinars coming up for those lazy Summer Friday lunchtimes ...

We've got two new free lunchtime webinars coming up to entertain, educate and inform you:

Date	Time	Your host	Topic
Friday 24th July	12:15 to 13:15	Andy (Brown)	Creating and changing images (and videos) using AI tools
Friday 14th August	12:15 to 13:15	Sam (Lowrie)	Creating Python visuals within Power BI Desktop

You can register for either - or both - of the webinars by clicking on the relevant link in the table above.

A scary webpage which reveals just how much any website knows about you

Think that if you reject cookies on a website they can't identify you? Think again:

Just a sample of the information that the excellent Since You Arrived website shows you're leaking out to the world.

And if that doesn't keep you awake at night, maybe these two articles from Richard Dawkins and Donald Knuth on how AI is leaving us behind might ...

Another chance to win £50 in our competition, and the results (and winner) for our last one

About 18 months ago we ran a competition asking you to have one shot only at creating an image using AI, and were amazed at how imaginative people's prompts (and images) were.

Image generation has improved so much since then that we've now decided to rerun the competition. To enter just type in your prompt on the image generation page of our website and (after a short wait) you'll see your image appear. You'll then be able to compare this with everyone else's efforts (although everything is completely anonymous). Your picture can be about ... anything! To be honest we're not quite sure who will win this month's £50 prize, or indeed WHY they'll win it ...

Finally, congratulations to Paul Silvester of North-East Lincolnshire Council: out of 29 entries for May's Spring Quiz, it was Paul's entry which was pulled out of the weighted and randomised Excel hat. A £50 voucher is on the way to him. You can see the answers to the quiz here.

Note that to keep our website content up-to-date we only publish newsletters from the last 3 calendar years.

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