Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 91 - October 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!

ChatGPT agent mode has the potential to change your working life - and end it, too

If you enable agent mode ChatGPT will create a new virtual computer somewhere on an OpenAI server and use this to research its answer. It's a bit like having your own personal robot at your beck and call:

A typical answer will take up to half an hour to arrive, but you can amuse yourself watching all the dead ends that ChatGPT goes down while trying to track down the right information (a bit like a human, in fact, except that it does everything much more quickly). Read this blog for a summary of what agent mode is and does, or set aside 20 minutes to watch this tutorial video giving the pros and cons of this new tool (together with case studies showing it being used in anger).

Our new course on using Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Excel, Outlook, Forms, etc)

Following requests we have launched a two-day Using Microsoft 365 course giving an overview of how to use the most important Microsoft 365 apps and of how they all tie together. You can expand any of the topics on the course web page.

There are dates scheduled for public courses from next year, or (as always) you can book a tailored course online or at your site, and we'll provide the equipment and courseware.

Learning a language? Forget Duolingo: book sessions with ChatGPT or an AI or human teacher instead

If you're trying to learn a foreign language what you need above all is conversational practice. You can get this from ChatGPT (which works suprisingly well if you're already reasonably proficient) or by speaking to an AI tool (through apps like Langua) or to a human (through apps like Verbling):

In the above example I'm chatting to Sonia from Colombia (who doesn't exist). I can click on the grey boxes if I get stuck to see what she's just said to me.

You can see your editor's experience of trying to speak and listen to Spanish using each of these 3 types of approach - with reviews of each - in this blog (en este blog).

Show the true size of any country by dragging it onto a comparison country on a Mercator map

Ever wondered how big the UK is relative to, say, Algeria? Now you can find out using a great website called TrueSize, which changes the size of any country as you drag it up or down the map:

You'll find if you play with this website that Africa is astonishingly big (and Algeria, of course, is the largest country in it).

September's Power BI update included DAX functions and better calendars (in preview) + 2 new slicers

The September Power BI update from Microsoft contains 2 exciting preview features (well, exciting if you're a DAX nerd): enhanced calendars (including new week functions) and the ability to write your own DAX functions.

The update also silently released list and text slicers from preview (an example of the latter is shown above).

This month's competition: name the 18 films whose titles contain a single misprint

For this month's competition we're asking you to identify 18 films represented in pictures (with each film's title containing a single misprint):

For example the above picture would yield The Lift of Pi, which is just one mistyped letter away from being The Life of Pi (you'll be pleased to know that this is much harder than most of the other 18 pictures!).

If you can identify at least 12 of the 18 films your name will go into our Excel sorting hat (the winner, chosen at random, will win a £50 voucher and a mention in the next newsletter).

Finally, congratulations to Jill Renwick of Improveasy for winning last month's animal word search competition. You can see the answer to the competition here (including one person's amusing attempt to get an AI tool to do the word search) ... and our struggle to get ChatGPT to show the correct lift buttons in the picture above here.

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

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