Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 92 - November 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!

Add to your lunch hour with a free Wise Owl webinar or a dedicated "Lunch and Learn" session

We've recently given a lunch-and-learn session for a client on a specific topic in Excel, and thought we'd offer this service more widely:

Food and expert Wise Owl training go together like ... peanut butter and banana?

Alternatively you could attend one of our new FREE webinars. Sam is giving the first one online on Friday 28th November between 12.15 and 13.15 on Power Automate Desktop, so if you've ever wondered what this is (and whether you should be using it) why not spend an hour finding out? You can see the contents of the webinar (and sign up) here.

A new Excel formula generator, Mico the Clippy replacement and a range of new 365 icons

Office 365 is continually changing. This month we bring news of the new Formula by Example feature within Excel:

Microsoft have also unveiled a new Copilot icon called Mico (rhyming with pico) to guide you, having clearly forgotten the lessons from the old Clippy assistant:

And finally, you're not going mad: the Office 365 icons HAVE changed!

Staying with Excel, you can now meaningfully embed Python code in your Excel sheet

For the first time Microsoft may have finally come up with something to supersede VBA. You can now embed Python code seamlessly within an Excel workbook, returning a spill array of data if necessary. Here's a tiny example:

Examples of use might include generating test data, manipulating tables of data, performing complex calculations, transforming images and the almost infinite possibilities that Python modules provide. We've written a long blog explaining how to use this new feature, and are thinking of running a dedicated course on the subject - but it won't happen unless people let us know if they'd be interested in it.

The fairly minimalist October Power BI update, and creating Azure shape maps in Power BI

Sam has published a long blog explaining how to use reference layers in Power BI to divide the UK into coloured regions:

In other Power BI news, the October 2025 update introduces a couple of small improvements to button slicers, but it's the fact that you can finally set a column's width to change automatically according to the data being displayed which moves us more.

Pineapples, stripes + tattoos: Jenny's (the other Wise Owl co-founder's) Amsterdam marathon musings

Regular readers may remember that in April one of the two Wise Owl co-founders Andy ran the London Marathon. On Sunday October 19th it was the turn of Jenny (the other co-founder) to run a marathon, this time in Amsterdam:

You can read about Jenny's take on her first (but apparently not last) marathon here, including how to manage toilet trips as a female, what Jeffing is (and how to do it) and why there is a man balancing a pineapple on his head in the above photo. And if you're broad-minded you can even see the tattoo that Jenny got to commemorate the event ...

This month's chance to win a £50 voucher, and the answer to (and winner of) last month's competition

This month we're asking you to create a system to test whether two words can be chained together a letter at a time:

The prize of £50 will be split equally between the first "correct" solution picked out of our sorting hat and the one deemed to be the "best" solution (beauty - in IT as in every other field - is in the eye of the beholder).

Congratulations to Sam Rodway of Barnsley Council for submitting the first of the 21 entries picked out of our randomised Excel sorting hat for last month's misprinted film pictures competition. You can see an explanation of all of the answers 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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