Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet  |  Issue 54 - March 2022

It all started in a basement in South Manchester in 1992.  John Major was Prime Minister and Right Said Fred were number one.  We've found a rare photo of Jenny and Andy (original owls) wearing their corporate T shirts on a cycle ride, and looking ... young, which you can see along with other nostalgia here.

If you're thinking of starting your own business, here are 5 lessons we've learnt - painfully - over the last 30 years, and would like to pass on.  Count down with us our 5 worst moments of the last 30 years!

If you can't look back on your 30th anniversary, when can you?  For the older reader, join us on a nostalgic look back over the software applications we've taught over the years (beginning with DataEase for DOS); you can join us on a tour through the 8 offices (or in some cases, "offices") we've worked in over the years; have a look at the evolution of our clients since we started; or track the evolution of our websites over time.

Doing the same thing for 30 years might sound boring - and it probably would have been if we had.  When we started we never imagined that our top blog would have over 125,000 views, our top video over a million and our top skills test would be taken nearly 150,000 times (we didn't actually know what a blog was; the word didn't exist).  See our top 10 blogs, videos and skills tests and lots of other stats on how we've passed the last 30 years.

In other news .... the new format pane in Power BI is still in preview, but it's turned on by default, so we're taking this opportunity to update all of our courseware and will be teaching using the new format pane from the 1st March onwards.  You can see all of the changes in the February Power BI Desktop update here.

One of your spies has hidden a message in an Excel picture: your task is to decipher it (although we've given a lot of clues!).  The first correct answer picked out of our sorting hat will - as always - win a fifty-pound Amazon voucher.  You can see the answers to (and winner of) last month's musicals word search competition here.

Sorry! We're raising our prices for most scheduled courses with effect from the middle of March, although this won't affect any existing bookings.

If you find Wordle too easy, you could try playing four games at once - just one of the 7 Wordle alternatives we've evaluated for you (and that's the last time Wordle will get a mention in our newsletter).

Since Sam and Shaun announced their weight-loss challenge back in November, many pounds have flowed under the bridge: but who is ahead?