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Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 53 - February 2022

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!

We've released our course schedule for 2022

You can see all of our courses up to the end of the year 2022 in this single (eminently bookmarkable!) course schedule PDF. If you book onto an advertised online course we will still run it even if you're the only delegate attending (COVID has made us slightly water down our no-cancellation guarantee for classroom training for now). As always if you can't see the dates you want (or if you have a group of people who want training) ask us for a quote for an onsite course.

Announcing two new Wise Owl Power BI courses

For some time now we've been aware that our old two-day advanced Power BI course tried to meet the needs of two different groups of people: report authors and data modellers. Taking account of this, we've split the course in two (so you can now book onto a two-day Advanced Power BI (Reports) course or a two-day Advanced Power BI (Data) one. If this all sounds confusing, you can see an explanation of who should attend which course here. We all still wait eagerly for the new formatting toolbar to go live in Power BI (there tend not to be any updates in January).

We've scheduled dates for our Python Classes course, and extended it to two days

If you're learning to program in Python, your journey will probably consist of two parts: learning the basic syntax, then learning how to create and manipulate objects using classes. We've now relaunched our Python Classes course to last three days (rather than one) to give us time to cover topics like inheritance and to cover topics like NumPy and Pandas, and we've also scheduled dates for this course from Easter.

You can now assign skills assessment tests, and create your own

It's taken a while to get here, but you can now (finally) use the Wise Owl site to book tests in for other candidates to take, and also create your own skills assessment tests. There's a small monthly fee for this service, although we won't be levying this until we get recurring payments working on our website.

How the Microsoft Power Toys utility finally solved one owl's quest

Your newsletter editor has been searching for years for a way to disable his Num Lock key, to no avail, but has now found a solution at last. The Power Toys utilities are written by Microsoft, and allow you to reprogram (or disable) keys, click on the screen to report on the hex colours of a pixel, find your mouse and show a guide to Windows key short-cuts, among many other tools.

We've updated to Visual Studio 2022 - should you?

Visual Studio 2022 is (finally) a 64-bit application, and includes more support for Azure and C++. For Joe Average programmer, though, the extent to which you like it will depend on how keen you are on the constant Intellisense suggestions made.

A detailed summary of the answers to our Christmas quiz - and an apology for its difficulty

Our Christmas quiz competition was won by someone at Southend Council, although we can't quite work out who! Apologies that it was so hard: not a single person got all 20 questions right. You can see a full analysis of the questions (with a guide to which people found the most difficult) here. We promise the next picture quiz will be easier!

This month's competition: a word search

For this month's competition we invite you to find 46 related items in a word search. Unused letters should spell out a related passage of text, which you should complete with a four-letter word. The first correct entry picked out of our sorting hat towards the end of February will win a fifty pound Amazon voucher.

Wise Owl tackle Wordle

Wordle is an online game which is sweeping the world: it's like a cross between the old Mastermind game and Scrabble. You can see more on Wordle here (including one owl's current progress and strategy). Or you could play it using Sam's Power BI version, Andy Brown's Python version or Andy Gould's astonishingly authentic Excel version (the last including code to generate the correct daily words, translated from the original JavaScript on the Wordle website). There's also a video explaining the Excel version if you prefer watching videos to reading blogs.

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

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