How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

>My bug that I found has to do with Excel 2016. At my company, we have many spreadsheets that use a feature in Excel called “Web Queries“. These allow one to download a web page, or a table that is on the web page, into cells in your excel document.

Ok, sounds janky, but go on...

>In my particular case, I am using this feature to connect our internal job tracking system that I developed to spreadsheets that are used for calculating pricing and energy savings (our company makes energy savings updates to refrigeration systems), and upload that result back to the tracking system.

Oh god why?? Why!?? What is this Frankenstein system you have created??

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#5

Post by 13of40 » Fri, May 26, 2017, 8:35 PM UTC

jpswade wrote: post #2

What about this? https://office365.uservoice.com/

Even better: https://excel.uservoice.com/

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#6

Post by namrog84 » Fri, May 26, 2017, 8:37 PM UTC

Hi schveiguy,

I am just a completely random MS employee, acting on my own behalf, who is browsing HN on my day off from work. I work in Xbox and don't work anywhere related to Excel or tech support. I just repro'd your issue in under 30 seconds in Excel 2016, and also submitted an issue internally on this. I hope it helps :)

http://i.imgur.com/N6X2Lj4.png

Also, I'd highly recommend using the builtin feedback menu, e.g. "send a frown" highlighting the issue. As well as making a post on https://excel.uservoice.com/. I know on my current and former teams, both of these(feedback & uservoice) get looked at quite often, even if there is only a few number of votes on them.

edit: +1 to https://answers.microsoft.com as mentioned by mherdeg

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#7

Post by mherdeg » Fri, May 26, 2017, 8:40 PM UTC

Ouch, sounds like this author used a long phone tree and talked to about ten front-line phone support technicians, none of whom were able to file a bug report. Bummer.

Also sounds like one or more of those people advised him to report his issue in the web support forums at https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_... , which in my experience often get really good feedback from employees and expert community contributors ("MVPs"). It sounds like the phone technicians did a bad job of explaining this resource which this author might have mistaken for static help documents (it's not).

Things may have changed in the past few years, but back when I worked in the PM organization that owned updates to this Web Query feature in Office 15 (the prior version), I remember that MVPs and PMs would absolutely trawl those forums looking for user-reported bugs and trying to help get them workarounds & fix the root-cause bug. YMMV of course, but many members of the team spent time every week looking for primary-source user feedback.

I definitely can't blame the author for taking the angle "OK, I tried CS, I'm going to give up and write a blog post" -- certainly very popular these days and works great for getting in touch with a tech company -- but it's too bad that the author didn't manage to get in touch with the community at answers.microsoft.com. The MVPs, employees, and other contributors there are often phenomenally helpful in doing bug triage and devising workarounds or real fixes. Seems like a case where first-line support might have been able to say "we can't fix this, but we know who can" quicker.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#8

Post by devopsproject » Fri, May 26, 2017, 8:42 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #4

>My bug that I found has to do with Excel 2016. At my company, we have many spreadsheets that use a feature in Excel called “Web Queries“. These allow one to download a web page, or a table that is on the web page, into cells in your excel document. Ok, sounds janky, but go on... >In my particular case, I am using this feature to connect our internal job tracking system that I developed to spreadsheets that are used…

because some phb only understands excel.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#9

Post by johansch » Fri, May 26, 2017, 9:07 PM UTC

namrog84 wrote: post #6

Hi schveiguy, I am just a completely random MS employee, acting on my own behalf, who is browsing HN on my day off from work. I work in Xbox and don't work anywhere related to Excel or tech support. I just repro'd your issue in under 30 seconds in Excel 2016, and also submitted an issue internally on this. I hope it helps :) http://i.imgur.com/N6X2Lj4.png Also, I'd highly recommend using the builtin feedback menu, e.…

Great illustration of the effectiveness of "Final Level: Write an Angry Blog Post". :)

But yeah, I do understand the challenges that are attached to having a very very large user base. There's no realistic way you can handle this in a great way for every person reporting a bug once you have 10M/100M/1000M MAUs.

Maybe machine learning can be a help here? At least in filtering out the, ahem, "idiots".

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#10

Post by perlgeek » Fri, May 26, 2017, 9:10 PM UTC

ElijahLynn wrote: post #3

That was fantastic!!! And to think, all they have to do is have a "report bug" item in the help menu.

... and then deal with several thousand bug reports a day? as much as I'd like that from a user perspective, a bug report is only helpful if somebody will actually take a look at it.