Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 83 - Christmas/New Year 2024/25

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!

The new voice mode in ChatGPT will take your breath away

Watch Wise Owl's Andy Brown's 6-minute conversation with the new voice-enabled AI assistant in ChatGPT and see how the world is going to change. Please do persevere past the first 20 seconds or so while voice mode loads. Laura (that's what Andy chose to call her) was happy to change her voice to a warm and engaging English accent, think of something surreal, re-enact the Dead Parrot sketch (playing the part of Michael Palin's shop-keeper) and switch effortlessly between different languages, but on principle she wouldn't giggle on demand or imitate someone else's voice. At no point in the conversation was there the slightest hint that Laura was not a real person.

A new test of Power BI skills, details of the latest PB updates and news of a forum for changes

Not before time, we've rewritten our Power BI Desktop skills test to bring it bang up to date: see how well you know Power BI here. On the subject of Power BI, there's now a Core Visuals Vision Board which shows all of the visual changes Microsoft are planning (for example, there are 5 interesting new advanced chart types which are pending). And finally on Power BI, the November 2024 update introduced barely any changes: as always we've summarised the ones that we think will affect readers of this newsletter.

Excel has a number of new features, including a way to highlight the active cell's column and row

Last month we brought you news of the PIVOTBY and GROUPBY functions, but often it's the little changes to Excel which make the difference: such as being able to focus much more clearly on the current cell, choose contrasting colours, regularise your drawings and use 3 new Excel templates (all of which new features are explained here).

Microsoft have announced preview versions of SQL Server 2025 and of Management Studio 21

In November Microsoft announced two new preview versions. SQL Server 2025 includes the new data vector type, while the next version of SQL Server Management Studio will include Copilot, and might include a dark theme.

A Power Automate flow to send emails to everyone on your Christmas card list

We've updated all 200+ pages of our Power Automate training courseware to use the new (rather than the classic) flow designer. To celebrate this Herculean task, here's a bonus blog on how to create a Power Automate flow to send out a Christmassy picture to everyone on your Christmas card list.

Our traditional Christmas present list for the nerd in your life

Traditionally (well, we did it last year also) we use our Christmas newsletter to give you some present ideas for the nerd in your life (which if you're reading this newsletter is almost certainly yourself). This year's crop includes a miniature plug-in keyboard containing just the 3 keys that you use most and a slightly rude bag for old cables that you'll never use.

A fun Christmas competition: a single-shot attempt at creating an image using ChatGPT

We have a fun Christmas challenge for you this month: you get one shot, and one shot only, at generating an image using ChatGPT. Just type in your prompt and (after a short wait) you'll see your image appear, and then be able to compare this with everyone else's efforts. Your picture can be about ... anything! To be honest we're not quite sure who will win this month's £50 prize (we may even split it, perhaps having separate winners for funniest picture, most thought-provoking image, weirdest picture, best quality picture and best prompt). If you're interested, by the way, you can see how we got this competition to work here.

Last month we asked you to transform football data using Power Query. We thought this was an interesting problem, but it turned out that only 3 people agreed (the lowest number of entrants ever to our monthly newsletter competition). Congratulations to Ed Boughton of PwC for beating the odds and being the first name drawn out of our Excel sorting hat; you can see the answers to the competition 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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