Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 41 - January 2021
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!
Programmers will be familiar with anonymous (lambda) functions, but for all other Excel users they will take a bit of getting used to. See a preview of how and whether Excel's new lambda functions will change your working life.
We're proud to announce that you can now buy our new pre-paid training vouchers. These allow you to protect your training budget while simultaneously getting up to 15% discount off our course prices (there are other benefits too). Find out how the scheme works here!
Excel is getting cleverer! Want to know the number of calories in a glass of orange juice? The latitude and longitude of your town or village? The gas composition of Saturn? The new data types will allow you to embed this sort of intelligence within Excel. You will also be able to create featured tables in Power BI allowing you to access your internal organisational data within a worksheet automatically. There's a lot to take in about live data types in Excel, but here's a good place to start.
Are you never quite sure what Power BI report server is and does? Or hazy about what Microsoft mean by paginated reports? Or maybe you wonder why there are two different (but very similar) versions of Power BI? Us too for all of these questions, which is why we've now written a long blog to demystify Power BI report server and everything to do with it.
We've added 5 new skills assessment tests to our website, to allow you to test the Office 365 skills of yourself, your staff, prospective employees or anyone else for that matter!
Initially the Power BI Desktop December update is really disappointing - there isn't really one - but the new small multiples feature just announced in preview makes up for this, allowing you to create two-dimensional grids of comparison charts! Microsoft have also announced a new Premium Per User licence, although no costs are available as yet.
We invite you to answer 20 questions loosely connected with events happening in 2021. You will automatically be entered into a modified version of our electronic sorting hat, in which your changes of winning our £50 Amazon voucher will be proportional to the number of questions you get right (so everyone will have a chance, but some people's chances will be better than others). You can see the answers to last month's logic puzzle (won by Rory O'Connor of Freemans Grattan Holdings) here, along with detailed instructions for how to solve it.
What did your family do over Christmas? We spent much of it playing a new board game, watching a box set and passing round a new book to read, giving rise to these 3 recommendations for how to pass your lockdown time.