Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 90 - September 2025

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!

Excel gets a COPILOT function, celebrates its 40th birthday and gets a formula bar font change

Excel now has a COPILOT function, but in this blog we look at whether you'll be able to access it and whether it should even exist. Speaking of Excel, did you know it celebrates its 40th birthday on 30th September?

We've found 5 of the best articles on this, including an Excel 4.0 training video dating back to 1992. And finally on Excel, you had noticed that the formula bar now uses a monospace font, hadn't you? You hadn't?

Our new Power BI course in writing M for Power Query - plus news of the last two Power BI updates

We've announced a new two-day course in writing M for Power Query. You can find out more on what the course covers and whether you should attend it here. Here's a snippet to whet your appetite:

While on the subject of Power BI, the July update included improvements to pie/donut charts and the release of field parameters from preview, while the August update included enhancements to the TMDL tabular model view.

News about Copilot 365 and about Copilot Studio Agents, but not - yet - about ChatGPT agent mode

About 15 months ago we wrote a blog pillorying Copilot 365, so we thought we'd see whether this tool for using AI within a closed 365 environment has improved (answer; yes, but ...). Staying with Copilot, Microsoft have (characteristically) confused everyone by using the name Copilot Agent to diescribe two different things:

Name	What it means
Copilot agent	A miniature AI tool dedicated to a specific single task
Copilot Studio Agent	A chatbot (until recently called a Power Virtual Agent)

We explain the difference between the two types of agent - and how to create each - in this blog. We're also trialling a new three-day course showing how to create Copilot Studio Agents.

And finally on AI ... we were going to cover the new agent mode in ChatGPT in this newsletter, but this proved to be such a big topic that we ran out of time to do it justice. Please be sure to check the newsletter we'll send out towards the end of September for more on this exciting new AI feature.

You can now use Visual Studio Code as an SQL editor, but Azure Data Studio is deprecated

Microsoft have announced that Azure Data Studio is being retired on 28th February next year, wtih the official replacement being Visual Studio Code. So if you're looking for a lightweight code editor as an alternative to SQL Server Management Studio, this detailed blog explains how to get up and running in VS Code, how use it to write queries and how to create database diagrams like this one:

SSMS users will be surprised and pleased to see that the lines join the correct fields!

A pot-pourri of other news

We've added a list of latest additons to the home page of our website, so that you can easily get to our latest content:

In other news, Microsoft have announced the deprecation of Publisher (it's worth reading this blog just for the meme on moving pictures in Word at the end), and Mercedes-Benz are trialling a feature to allow you to connect to Teams calls even while you're driving ...

Find the 29 animals hidden in the undergrowth to win a £50 voucher (plus last month's quiz answers)

This month's competition challenges you to find the 29 land-based animals hidden in our word undergrowth, and thereby uncover the hidden quotation:

The first correct entry drawn by Reg (our Randomised Excel Generator) will win a £50 voucher and a modicum of fame.

Congratulations to Jackie Rutherford for winning the £50 voucher from last newsletter's competition (with people's chances of winning weighted by the number of questions they got right). You can see a full list of the answers to the quiz here, with source citations (the answers include one of my all-time favourite bit of news: about Abbygail-Nigella Borst's support alpaca and its visit to a supermarket).

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

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