AD0-E207 tricks - Adobe Analytics Architect Master Updated: 2023

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The best Adobe Illustrator tutorials can unlock new skills for beginners and advanced users alike. Illustrator remains the industry-standard vector graphics tool for designers in many sectors, and that means there's a huge community and plenty of tips and tutorials out there, whether it's to help you get started, to delve into more advanced techniques or just for a quick tour of what's new in Illustrator 2023.

If you still need the software, see our guide to how to download Adobe Illustrator and our regularly updated roundup of best Adobe deals – or go direct to Adobe's special offers page. For more ways to get the most from Adobe Illustrator, see our guide to the best illustrator plugins. 

The best Adobe Illustrator tutorials

We'll begin with the best beginner Adobe Illustrator tutorials. If you're getting started, these will provide you a solid grounding in Illustrator's basic tools and techniques. You'll learn the ins and outs of the Illustrator workspace and how to open and save your images.

Adobe Illustrator beginner tutorials

01. Illustrator tutorial for beginners in 10 minutes

This quick walkthrough deals with the Adobe Illustrator basics. You'll learn everything you need to get started in just 10 minutes (enjoy the richness of the narrator's voice while you're at it – one person comments that he sounds like Disney's Goofy. This tutorial will teach you all about Creative Cloud, how to use the interface and save documents, what vectors are, how to resize and so on. 

Meanwhile, if you're already familiar with Adobe Illustrator but want to see what's new in the latest edition, this five-minute YouTube overview on YouTube provides a good summary of CC 2021.

02. Illustrator for iPad 2022 beginners tutorial

Of course, as well as the desktop version, Adobe Illustrator is also available for the iPad. This tutorial offers a succinct beginners' guide to what you'll find in the iPad version of the software and how to get started. It provides a basic tools and gestures overview and walks us through working with layers, grids and guides, how to combine and edit shapes and how to apply colour and gradients. Users who are already familiar with the desktop version might also find this useful as a quick overview of what to expect from the iPad package.

Basic tools in Adobe Illustrator

03. How to use the Color Picker

Adobe Illustrator's Color Picker allows you to select and apply colours to your artwork in Illustrator CC. This six-step Adobe tutorial offers a quick demonstration of how to use the Color Picker tool.

04. Add text to your designs

Want to add text to your designs in Illustrator CC? This beginner-level Adobe Illustrator tutorial introduces the basics of how to do just that. You’ll learn how to add text, apply formatting, reshape and style it, and also how to place text on or inside a path.

05. Masking in Illustrator

As you probably already know, masking allows you to hide or reveal different parts of an image or design. In this Adobe Illustrator tutorial, you'll learn about three different masking techniques: clipping mask, opacity mask and draw inside. 

06. Transform and edit artwork

This Adobe tutorial runs through the basics of how to transform and edit artwork designed in Adobe Illustrator CC. You'll learn how to resize artwork, and how to use groups, align objects and more using the Selection tool, Transform panel, and other transform tools.

07. Get to know Adobe Illustrator's drawing tools

This handy tutorial focuses on the wide variety of drawing tools you'll find in Illustrator's Tools panel, each of which allows you to create in different ways. The tutorial will provide you a good understanding of how to use the Pen tool, Pencil tool, Curvature tool and Paintbrush tool.

08. Add images and artistic effects

This tutorial on how to add images and artistic effects starts out by explaining the basics of how to add images to projects in Adobe Illustrator CC. It then walks you through how to add and edit effects, apply brush strokes, and more. 

09. Edit paths in Illustrator CC

This Adobe Illustrator tutorial shows how to edit paths in your artwork using a variety of tools and options, including the Pen tool, Curvature tool, Anchor Point tool and others.

10. A guide to Pathfinder Shape modes

There are four different ways to combine basic shapes in Illustrator: unite, subtract, intersect and exclude overlap. In this handy tutorial, Dansky runs through how to use each one in just two minutes. 

Adobe Illustrator workflow

11. Illustrator hacks

Designer Matthew Lucas shared a whole bunch of useful Illustrator hacks in a post on Twitter. They went down a storm, with fellow designers asking for more. See one of them above, and check out our post about his Illustrator hacks.

12. Work with artboards

This tutorial offers another look at artboards in Illustrator CC. It explains the function of artboards, which are similar to pages in InDesign CC or Microsoft Word. Watch this and the video tutorial from Dansky above, and you’ll quickly learn how to create and edit multiple artboards.

13. Shortcuts to speed up your workflow

If you’re not using shortcuts, you’re probably not working as efficiently as you could. Here’s a great list of Illustrator shortcuts that can help you Improve your workflow and save you time. There are options for handling layers, selections, text and more, along with some handy hints for brushes, saving and closing, and viewing options. 

Exporting and sharing work

14. Shortcut your logo design exports

Creatives will be all too familiar with the hassle of exporting logos in various sizes and formats for different client needs, but Dansky has created a handy free pack to make that a whole lot easier. In this helpful video tutorial, he shows how to streamline the process of exporting logo designs to meet different specs.

15. How to share artwork in Adobe Illustrator

This Adobe guide covers the basics of sharing in Illustrator CC. It covers the courses of how to share files, how to save them as PDFs and how to export images.

16. Export assets for web and app design

It’s important to be able to share your Adobe Illustrator assets in different formats. This tutorial explains how to export higher quality SVG artwork for use in web and app projects.

Adobe Illustrator tutorials for intermediate users

Intermediate features and creative techniques

17. Adobe Illustrator 2023 New Features

If you're a seasoned user of Illustrator and simply want to know what's new in Illustrator 2023, the latest update, this clear and succinct Illustrator tutorial from Pixel & Bracket Illustrator Tutorials should be just the ticket. The video runs through all the new features in Illustrator 2023 in just over 3 minutes, including Illustrator Quick Actions, expanded 3D format support, new collaboration options and the Intertwine tool, which allows you to overlap parts of objects or shapes.

18. 10 incredible Adobe Illustrator tips and tricks

Will Paterson is full of tips that can be handy for both "professionals and normal people",  and there really are some true gems in here, such as tips for using multiple artboards in one file and scaling strokes and effects. Some of these tips and tricks can be highly effective when it comes to streamlining your processes and improving your workflow.

19. Design a gradient logo in Illustrator

Gradients just aren't going out of fashion, especially in brand schemes. In this popular video tutorial, Dansky walks us though how to create a simple gradient logo in Adobe Illustrator.

20. Learn how to draw anything in Illustrator CC

This Illustrator tutorial is taught by certified Adobe Design Master Martin Perhiniak, who was voted one of the top 10 Adobe instructors back in 2015. His video explores different drawing techniques in Adobe Illustrator CC. He offers advice to help you improve your skills when working with shapes. It's well worth a look.

21. Create sets of product icons in Illustrator

Icons are a world all on their own. Here Ben O'Brien – aka Ben The Illustrator – walks us through the process of creating simple yet effective sets of illustrated icons using Illustrator in an easy to follow tutorial.

22. How to design graphic figures in Illustrator

Learn how to turn your basic stick men into graphic figures with their own style and personality in this Illustrator CC tutorial from Ben O'Brien.

23. Creative shapes for logo design

Here, the ever-informative Dansky explores how to take shapes to the next level. He offers a range of techniques that you can use to transform basic shapes into more complex shapes by working with elements such as gradients, opacity and the Shape Builder tool.

24. Create a calligraphic brush in Illustrator

One of the great things about Adobe Illustrator is the ability to create your own brushes. Here, Chris Rathbone explains how to create your own vector Illustrator brush in three simple steps.

25. Design more efficiently with Dynamic Symbols

Illustrator CC's Dynamic Symbols tool allows you to dynamically change a symbol's attributes to streamline the creation of artwork. This tutorial explains how to use the tool to create multiple instances of a master symbol, which then retain their link to the master symbol even when their shape and visual attributes are altered. 

26. Use the Perspective Grid

With Illustrator CC’s Perspective Grid, you can either place existing artwork in a perspective plane or draw directly on to the grid. This tutorial from Matthew Pizzi uses both methods to show us how to create a 3D gift box. He also teaches us an easy way to create a reflection.

27. Design a logo in Adobe Illustrator

Want to create a logo that will look just as good in print and on screen while combining imagery with text? This tutorial shows you how to design a logo.

28. Create a web icon in Adobe Illustrator 

This tutorial teaches you how to make a web icon. Learn how to modify simple shapes to create a camera icon that can be used as a social media profile avatar and as a button linking to a portfolio on a digital CV. 

29. Create an app icon in Adobe Illustrator 

Another step-by-step tutorial from Matthew Pizzi, this one shows how to create a calculator app icon in Illustrator. You’ll use a variety of shape tools, the Pen tool, and the 3D features of Illustrator CC.

30. Create a geometric logo design in Illustrator 

This tutorial looks at how to create a perfectly geometric logo design. Begin by creating an initial pattern using smart guides, then remove areas from shapes using the Shape Builder tool or Pathfinder tool. Then add gradients. 

31. Quickly join and trim paths

Learning how to join paths is a great way to clean up your line work in Illustrator CC. This tutorial explains how to trim excess line segments from intersecting paths and how to close the gaps between two open paths.

32. Vector avatar characters with Illustrator

Cartoon-style avatars are a halfway house between formal representation and stylised illustration, allowing a degree of anonymity for the person pictured. Another tutorial from Chris Spooner, this one shows how to use the vector tools in Adobe Illustrator to produce a simple avatar with a line art style and flat colours.

33. Create a line art badge logo in Illustrator

Chris Spooner has a host of useful Illustrator tutorials. In this tutorial, he goes through the process of creating a line art badge logo design. There's been a trend of designing logos in the style of line art, featuring simplified illustrations to produce a minimalist design. This shows just how to do it.

Adobe Illustrator tutorials for advanced users

More advanced techniques

34. Create a custom brush in Illustrator

Building a custom Illustrator brush is a great way to put a unique stamp on your work. While the software comes with watercolour-style brushes out of the box, this advanced Adobe Illustrator tutorial explores how you can make your own custom brush.  

35. Create 3D sushi in seconds in Adobe Illustrator

In this quick and entertaining Adobe Illustrator tutorial, Montenegro-based graphic designer Elena Baryshkina shows how to create 3D sushi in Illustrator. So this may seem like a very specific brief, but it doesn't have to be sushi. Once you've learned the technique you can apply it to create 3D illustrations of other kinds. Illustrator has been gradually expanding its 3D support, and this process allows you to create 3D imagery starting from a flat illustration using the 3D and Materials panel.

36. Create a multi-exposure image

In this Adobe Illustrator tutorial, Ruslan Khasanov creates a multi-exposure illustration to express the concept of multilocalism. He explains how he created it from vision to the finished artwork using Photoshop, Illustrator, Dimension, Adobe Stock, and traditional paints. Follow the tutorial to learn how you can create a multi-exposure image.

37. Unlock Adobe Illustrator's secret symmetry mode

Illustrator doesn't have a dedicated symmetry mode, but in this video, Dansky shares a smart hack that enables you to create a similar effect using the Distort and Transform tool. This is one of those tricks that's fun to play around with to create unexpected effects. 

38. Pose characters using the Puppet Warp tool

In this Adobe Illustrator tutorial, Ben O'Brien looks at how to get started with the Puppet Warp tool. He explores how to use the tools various functions, how to rig characters in preparation for posing using the tool and how to use the Puppet Warp tool to adjust graphic lines or objects. He also discussed how to use your skills to bring personality to a character using the tool.

39. Warp, pose, and sculpt your artwork with ease

This advanced Adobe Illustrator tutorial teaches you how to make smooth adjustments to parts of vector drawings. The technique involves placing pins using the Puppet Warp tool, and then manipulating specific areas of your artwork.

40. Create a busy city scene

Learn how to add dynamism and atmosphere to a bustling street scene with this step-by-step guide from Ben O’Brien. You’ll build architecture, add figures, place street furniture and experiment with colour to create a lively illustration in Illustrator.

41. How to create colourful gradient orbs

This tutorial demonstrates how to use the Gradient Mesh tool to create a colourful circular orb, which can then be modified into an abstract shape with Illustrator's Warp tool. The design can then be used in all kinds of branding or art projects.

42. Prepare Illustrator graphics for After Effects

Adobe Illustrator files often get passed over for animation when they're clearly not ready for After Effects. Jeff Hurd's checklist will help you ensure your designs are ready for animation before you hand them over.

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The streaming video ecosystem is shifting focus from maximizing subscriber growth at all costs to maximizing profit. The goal for over-the-top (OTT) businesses has become less about getting new customers in the door, and more about keeping the most high-value customers satisfied. Whether it’s a subscription or advertising-based business, average revenue per user (ARPU) growth is positioning itself as the most important metric for any direct-to-consumer (DTC) company. However, in an oversaturated market where consumers can hop from platform to platform with ease, securing a portion of your audience’s attention and wallet has never been more difficult.

Streaming platforms are rising to the challenge by turning retention into a data-driven art. DTC businesses have a treasure trove of first-party behavioral data at their disposal, and on a foundational level, they are analyzing this data to paint a clearer picture of why people are coming to a service, how they interact within the service, and why they might be leaving.

In accurate years, however, the advantage of having first-party data has expanded far past basic data analytics, giving way to the ability to create far more advanced predictive machine learning (ML) models. After all, when it comes to data, if we can measure it, we can probably predict it.

By harnessing the value of advanced predictive analytics, streaming platforms can ensure that they’re using all the information at their disposal to make the most informed decisions possible about marketing, packaging, and content, thus leading to more efficient acquisition, retention, user engagement, and monetization.

The Power of Prediction

Data scientists can create ML models that output propensity scores that indicate a user’s likelihood to commit a certain action; for example, their likelihood to churn, stream content, or buy pay-per-view. These machine learning algorithms are constructed by joining both first-party data (like streaming behavior and transactional activity) with third-party data (external customer attributes, country-specific features, etc.), resulting in attributes like minutes spent streaming on-demand vs. live content, location, device, how long a user has been a subscriber, and/or any number of additional factors. Every DTC platform will leverage different data points depending on the specific nuance of the platform, as well as what distinct action it’s trying to predict.

The beauty of leveraging machine learning in the streaming ecosystem is these models get better and better as more data is collected. As users continue to stream and transact, the algorithm can assess the accuracy of prediction and Improve based on these learnings. This allows for more precise segmentation and, ultimately, more useful predictions.

Using Data to Engage Viewers and Mitigate Churn

There is no shortage of use cases when it comes to prediction. Below, we’ll walk through two areas where DTC businesses can derive value from these practices: marketing and user experience.

1. Targeted Marketing

It’s clear that real time data analytics helps businesses better understand their audiences and know how to message to them but predictive data algorithms enable businesses to get even more calculated when segmenting audiences. If a streaming platform knows that a certain group of users is likely to churn based off an ML model, it can communicate to those users differently than it would to users not likely to churn. For example, it could offer those users a complimentary month of the service, buying the business 30 more days to communicate directly with the user and reestablish the value of the platform. Alternatively, it could offer these likely-to-churn users a financial incentive, such as an enticing discount on an annual subscription. By only communicating a discounted offer to those most likely to churn, the business can save a substantial amount of revenue they may have lost by offering that financial incentive to users who were not at risk.

2. Personalized User Recommendations

Personalized content recommendations can increase engagement within a platform, resulting in habit formation that helps mitigate churn. By leveraging historical user event data, platforms can suggest new content to pull the user in. You watched The Last of Us? Check out these four similar shows. Liked The Fabelmans? Here are three other movies directed by Steven Spielberg. Using machine learning, platforms can derive learnings from the entire population of viewers and personalize the user experience accordingly.

Recommendation engines are built off predictive models to determine a user’s likelihood to stream a certain piece of content in the future. For example, if a UFC fan has watched every Conor McGregor fight and interview they could find on UFC Fight Pass, there’s a high likelihood they’ll watch another. UFC Fight Pass could then proactively recommend new or undiscovered McGregor content based on these models. Using machine learning algorithms to build content recommendation engines is an effective way to increase user engagement, which in turn can help to lower churn rates.

The Future of Streaming is Data-First

Sustainable user engagement and churn mitigation will continue to be both an art and science for streaming platforms. As the industry continues to shift from maximizing subscribers to maximizing high-value user ARPU growth, the platforms that harness the power of data and machine learning will be best positioned to cultivate an engaging—and profitable—experience for users.

Bio:

Beau Decker is the Senior Director of Growth Marketing for Endeavor Streaming, a global streaming leader in sports, entertainment, media and lifestyle. Prior to Endeavor Streaming, Beau held other marketing-driven roles across other Endeavor properties. He oversaw a growth marketing team responsible for the engagements across Endeavor’s owned OTT properties, such as UFC’s Fight Pass, PBR’s RidePass, and New York Fashion Week: All Access. Additionally, he has worked with Endeavor’s podcasting division, Endeavor Audio, where he managed the development of media strategy and execution for the launch of several podcasts, including Blackout, Freaknik and The Bellas Podcast. During his first two years at Endeavor, Beau worked to execute digital performance media engagements for Endeavor’s events. His responsibilities included developing and executing customer acquisition marketing strategies with KPIs including ROAS, ticket sales, awareness and more for some of the biggest live events across the globe.

Previously, Beau spent several years on the Pfizer account at Carat, planning and executing media activations across online and offline media for one of the biggest advertisers in the U.S. At Carat, he developed a significant amount of his institutional marketing and media skills. Beau is a graduate from the University of Notre Dame, where he received a bachelor’s degree in marketing.

[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Endeavor Streaming. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]

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Microsoft Excel is the original low-code tool, but data and business logic in an Excel spreadsheet are not managed and not necessarily shared with other business users, so they are not something that can be easily reused outside that spreadsheet. Data in the data platform used by Microsoft’s Power Platform, Dataverse, is richer: There’s metadata that tags business objects like email addresses, invoices and order numbers with details of what should be in them and what business do with them, plus support for business logic, authorization, intelligence and analytics.

Jump to:

The generative AI Power Apps Copilot can already be used to build applications in Microsoft Dataverse by describing in natural language what a user wants the app to do. For example, they can ask Copilot to add more screens, controls and features as they get more ideas.

Excel to App is a new tool in preview to help users bring in data they already have in spreadsheets. It does exactly what the name suggests: Users can drag and drop unstructured data from Excel — or provide Copilot a link to the file — and the Power Platform will analyze it, enrich it with the extra information Dataverse needs, and turn it into an app, Nirav Shah, the vice president of Dataverse at Microsoft, explained to TechRepublic ahead of the Microsoft Build event. At the Build developer conference, Microsoft is announcing a range of new AI tools and services.

“Because it’s Power Apps Copilot-enabled, it’s inferring what the table structure should be, how should it name it, what are the descriptions, what are the columns that need to exist and the data types of those columns,” Shah said. “For enumerations (which are lists of possible values), it even automatically generates the values for the option set in the Dataverse schema for you.”

Giving all that Excel data a new home in Dataverse is great for data governance.

“Taking that unmanaged and citizen data out there that’s ungoverned across the enterprise and turning it into a fully managed, structured cloud back end with full authorization policies, governance and security that can scale as the business needs can help alleviate the shadow IT that exists across the enterprise,” Shah pointed out.

The new elastic tables in Dataverse can handle large volumes of non-relational data, up to ingesting tens of millions of rows an hour.

Enterprises already use tools to find “load-bearing” Excel spreadsheets that business users depend on. Now they can encourage them to bring that critical data into Dataverse where the IT team can back up, version and manage it, and other business users can take advantage of it. But, Shah suggested individual users will also want to bring their Excel data into the Power Platform so they can use tools there — like natural language for building the user interface for their app.

“We think this is going to remove a lot of friction,” Shah said. “It provides folks doing personal productivity (tasks in Excel) with a path forward to see the art of the possible with the richness that Dataverse in the Power Platform can provide them.

“Dataverse is the native backend that’s interconnected across the whole Power Platform and making the transition from Excel, all the richness and capabilities we’ve got across the rest of the Power Platform. The fact that you can do this in under a minute really removes the barriers for developers to start leveraging more and more of those capabilities within Dataverse on top of that data.”

New AI-powered tools in Dataverse

Data in Excel might be easy for users to work with individually, but bringing it to Dataverse connects it to a range of new AI tools.

Power Virtual Agent chatbots

Once data is in Dataverse, it’s available for Power Virtual Agents chatbots to use, including the Teams bots users can now make. If a user keeps a list of company hardware assets like projectors in Excel and brings that into Dataverse instead, it could become part of an onboarding chatbot that helps new employees find out how to do things, alongside the official company HR tools.

Those bots can use the Azure Open AI Service to start answering questions the original creator of the bot didn’t design them to handle. For instance, if someone adds VR headsets and HoloLens to the hardware list, they can tell Copilot to include them in the app, and the bot could answer questions about them without the bot author adding those details manually.

Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code

The Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code simplifies creating apps for Teams that use Adaptive Cards as the interface inside Teams. Along with the ChatGPT plugins that Bing is standardizing for its AI chat and Power Platform connectors, the Teams message extensions that can be created with the Teams Toolkit will work as plugins for Microsoft 365 Copilot — the AI tools coming to the Office applications and services, which will have access to data from Dynamics 365 and Power Platform stored in Dataverse.

If there’s a task you need to complete often enough to automate that specifically, it might make sense to create an app in Power Apps to do it. Or once the data is in Dataverse, it might be easier to just ask Copilot to provide a status update for the best sales opportunities or a list of the top trending customer issues in the last week. But users don’t have to choose as apps made using Power Apps Copilot have Copilot in them, so they can ask Copilot to do things inside the app.

Data hygiene tools

Now that it’s so easy to use the data in Dataverse for AI what Shah calls “data-driven applications,” it’s vital for it to be clean, complete and correct. This means that it must have full customer details with no missing lines in addresses and all the right details on an invoice. New AI-powered data hygiene tools in Dataverse do deduplication and smart data validation for objects like email addresses and URLs, as well as physical addresses.

“Dataverse has the semantic data model with a deeper knowledge of what the implicit value of the data is for emails and addresses because those are concrete data types, so it can automatically provide a lot more richness in terms of data validation,” said Shah.

Cleaning and normalizing data is something that business users might not think of doing, so having it built into the platform will help them get better results.

“We want to simplify and make it more turnkey for developers to get higher quality data into the system so that the insights, the applications, the business processes are providing as much value as possible for end users of the applications and processes developers are building on top of the system,” Shah said.

SEE: TechRepublic’s cheat sheet about data cleansing

How low-code developers can use Power Fx with Dataverse

Low-code developers can also use the Power Fx language, which will be familiar to anyone who has created Excel functions, to write their own custom validations for any instant or on-demand actions — or to build other reusable plugins for business logic and Dataverse rules with triggers and actions that work with Power Platform connectors and web APIs.

“These are a low-code way to develop business logic and incorporate that into the system without having to go into full-fledged .NET development,” said Shah. “You can trigger on specific records being created or updated within the system and then orchestrate what you want to happen using Power Fx to call other APIs within Dataverse to interact with other data in the system or invoke any of our thousand-plus Power Platform connectors (to other data sources) to orchestrate that logic or even build new APIs using Power FX and then expose those as capabilities that can be leveraged from anything built on top of Dataverse.”

That could send an email to customers thanking them for their orders or replicate anything else that users could do with a SQL stored procedure, but do it directly from Dataverse, rather than needing to know how to program a SQL database.

Users can already create rich custom business logic on events and actions in Dataverse, but this simplifies building that without having to do a lot of bespoke development work.

“We’ve removed a lot of the barrier to entry and made it far easier and more composable to use all the building blocks that already exist within the system,” Shah continued. “It’s leveraging the context that we have within the environment and the data models to make it easier and quicker for developers to add that business logic into the system.”

Using SQL with Dataverse

Dataverse is much more than a SQL database, but developers who already know how to use SQL to write queries to explore, filter, aggregate, sort, join and group data can use the new web-based SQL editor in Power Apps Studio to use those SQL queries against Dataverse tables.

That’s useful because it means existing database developers don’t have to learn a new way to query data, but the same technology is also how the different Microsoft Copilots can work with Dataverse data.

“Behind the scenes, what we’re doing is transforming the query from a logical representation that is manifested through the metadata in Dataverse into the physical storage that we’ve got within Dataverse,” Shah explained. “It’s also a key component to how we support many of the Copilot scenarios being built on top of Dataverse.

“The ability for us to take natural language and translate that into a structured query that can run in the context of the user, with their security and the authorization rules apply to them, to be able to respond to those natural language queries for Power App Copilot, and other Copilots across the Microsoft ecosystem is really, at the core, powered by our support for SQL query on top of Dataverse.”

Again, this helps experienced developers work faster, Shah suggested.

“Professional developers don’t have to build and put all those pieces together themselves,” Shah said. “Because we have that understanding, because we have that native connectivity into the broader Power Platform ecosystem, we’re able to connect the dots automatically, so that they can build these app-specific Copilot experiences in a turnkey fashion and get that value out to their users more quickly, easily, than spending the time to build up that scaffolding themselves.”

SEE: How to query multiple tables in SQL in this TechRepublic tutorial

Securing data via Microsoft Dataverse

With so much important data in Dataverse, organizations may be looking for extra security options. If a user manages their own encryption keys in Azure Key Vault, they can now use this Bring Your Own Key option with Dataverse. They can also limit access based on IP address almost in real time with a new IP firewall that lets the security team choose the IP range users can connect from.

If someone tries to take sensitive actions like deleting their account — which might be legitimate but could also suggest their account has been taken over by an attacker — Azure Active Directory continuous access evaluation takes a look at how the account is authenticated and where it’s connecting from. If a user moved to a different IP address by going home or their machine shows up as connecting from an unfamiliar location, and it’s not in the allowed IP range, their request will be blocked, even though they were already logged in and would usually be allowed to do it.

“Workforces are more remote and hybrid and moving across the world in ways which they haven’t been historically,” Shah pointed out. “If you don’t want users to join from a coffee shop down the street, or you want to keep them in your corporate network, the IP firewall provides a mechanism, another defense in depth capability for folks to secure their infrastructure and protect their precious asset, which is their data.”

The policy for what users are allowed to do with that data might be different depending on which department they work for, and now it can change by what location they’re working in.

Bing Chat's native image creator follows the same formula as OpenAI's Dall-E image creator, outputting images at 1024 x 1024 pixels resolution in response to text prompts. But once a set of images is created, the only options you get are saving it to an online collection, downloading it locally, or sharing the whole set. There is no option for tweaking or editing the final result, save for entering a fresh text prompt. That's where Firefly in Bard takes the lead, thanks to native integration with Adobe Express.

Express is Adobe's own cloud-based suite of photo editing tools and templates. Adobe says once users are done creating their images, they will "have the ability to edit and further modify it using Express right within the Bard platform." Adobe Express also offers access to a wide selection of templates, fonts, and other multimedia assets. Moreover, Express lets users post their finished AI-generated content directly to social media platforms.

Microsoft currently offers a free credit system that lets users create AI-generated images with a limited number of "boosts" on a daily basis. Once you run out of those free boosts, you will still be able to create as many images as you want, but the process will be slow. Neither Adobe nor Google has detailed any such system yet, and there is no word if an Adobe subscription will be required to access the full suite of Firefly and Express tools in Bard.

TL;DR: As of June 2, get a three-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud Apps for just $29.99 — that's 87% off list price.

Digital artists may not need to buy new tubes of paint or fresh pens, but art software can get expensive. If you’re paying every month, even a low price can start to add up. If you want to cut costs without losing any of the tools you rely on, get the Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps three-month subscription for $29.99.

This low-cost subscription comes with 26 apps and 100GB cloud storage, and you can stack multiple purchases.

Get a three-month stackable subscription to all Adobe CC apps 

If you know you’re going to be using apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects for a while, this may be a more affordable way to get them all at once. Here’s how it works:

1. Make your purchase here and receive codes in your inbox

2. Create an Adobe account before you redeem your codes

3. Redeem your codes

4. Download your software on up to two devices

This subscription comes with the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite of apps. You might be familiar with some of the big names, but you could expand your creative work with apps that let you control layered 2D puppets, create vector-based UX designs, craft websites, and more. It’s up to you how long your subscriptions last. Each set of three months has the same price, and you can stack as many as you’d like. The 100GB cloud storage will stay the same size.

It’s not just apps you’re unlocking with this subscription. You also get access to extra features like step-by-step tutorials, Adobe Express, Portfolio, and Fonts. You’ll even get over one million free assets. That includes stock photos, templates, and more.

Save on the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite

Digital artists, designers, and creatives of all kinds may be able to find their niche with an expansive set of art and design apps at a low cost.

For a limited time, get a three-month stackable subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite (All Apps) for $29.99 (reg. $247).

Prices subject to change. 

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Dive Brief:

• Online prices fell 1.8% year over year in April, the eighth consecutive month of price declines compared to the previous year, according to Adobe’s Digital Price Index powered by Adobe Analytics. Compared to the month prior, prices dropped 0.7% in April.
• Computers saw a significant year over year decrease at 15.4%, followed by electronics (11.6%), sporting goods (6.4%), toys (5.9%) and home and garden items (5.6%), Adobe found. Appliances dropped 7.1%, the largest year-over-year drop for the category since Adobe began tracking online prices in 2014.
• By contrast, grocery prices rose 9.3% year over year, and personal care product prices increased by 3% compared to 2022, per the report.

Dive Insight:

The majority of categories tracked by Adobe have seen falling prices on an annual basis.

Additionally, online prices for some categories are declining from one month to the next. In its analysis of online prices in April, Adobe found month-over-month price declines in appliances (2.1%), toys (0.2%), personal care products (1.1%) and home and garden (0.8%). On the other hand, the firm found month-over-month price increases in electronics (0.5%), computers (1.9%) and grocery items (0.4%).

While grocery prices were up year over year, those increases have slowed for seven consecutive months, according to Adobe. The rate of growth for grocery peaked in September 2022, when prices rose 14.3%. Another recent report from Bricks Meets Click and Mercatus found that online grocery sales in the U.S. dropped by 7.6% in March compared to the same period in 2022.

Despite fluctuating prices for e-commerce purchases, the online shopping trend is projected to stay. A Forrester report released last August predicted that U.S. e-commerce sales would reach $1.6 trillion by 2027. The report also said buy online, pick-up in-store sales would reach over $200 billion by 2027.

Recall that R is a statistical programming language—a language designed to do things like t-tests, regression, and so on. The core of R was developed during the 1970s and since then, many libraries (such as the Tidyverse for data manipulation) have been developed to greatly extend the functionality of the language.

Python, on the other hand, is a general purpose computer language. It can be used to create just about any kind of software that can be written on a computer, including Windows-based applications. However, in accurate years the open source community has developed increasingly-sophisticated data manipulation, statistical analysis, and machine learning libraries for Python. We are now at the point that R and Python are roughly comparable in functionality.

My guess is that Python will eventually supersede R for most data manipulation analysis and tasks. The underlying Python language is modern and clean. So much of the syntactic weirdness of R and the Tidyverse are missing from Python. There are notable exceptions, of course. Some Python libraries like statsmodels were designed specifically to use R-like syntax.