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First, I think it's good that Microsoft and others separate tech support from bug reporting . Obviously some support requests will be due to bugs - but I'd never ever try to enter a bug via tech support (and this article shows why). That said, the Microsoft way of bug reporting is utterly infuriating. If a bug like this is reported you want a human response from a developer familiar with the code in question, within…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, I'd highly recommend using the builtin feedback menu, e.g. "send a frown" You're referencing The Circle right? Please don't tell me Smiles and Frowns are a thing in 2017. Edit: posted this before clicking the screenshot. I see. What's the ETA on closing The Circle?
Out of curiosity, what is The Circle? Excel 2016 does have a feedback menu with Smiles and Frowns. File -> Feedback Disclaimer: MSFT Employee (not in office)
It's a dystopic novel focused on an employee at a tech company modeled after Google/Facebook... except taking their data ventures even farther. :)
First, I think it's good that Microsoft and others separate tech support from bug reporting . Obviously some support requests will be due to bugs - but I'd never ever try to enter a bug via tech support (and this article shows why). That said, the Microsoft way of bug reporting is utterly infuriating. If a bug like this is reported you want a human response from a developer familiar with the code in question, within…
How do you propose filtering tech support from bug reports at scale?
These customer support people talk to people like this all day. They can know when an issue is an actual bug.
The real trick is to know somebody who works on the product. Seems to be the only way I've ever seen any bug get reported and fixed.
Funny, wildly different times, I don't think github was even popular (existed?) back then.
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.…
So you are saying it actually worked. Awesome! And thank you very much! I honestly didn't know about the "frown" thing. I frankly have a hard time finding stuff in the menu on the 2016 products. I spent about 5 minutes looking at another person's PC (who was having the issue originally) to figure out what version of office they had before finally just clicking on the start menu and seeing "Excel 2016". Help->About ju…
I had a similar experience recently. My kid was trying to play Minecraft on her iPhone with her friends and it required her to login with her Xbox Account (which is another name for her Microsoft Account) but she didn't have permissions to play online because her account was a child member of a family and I hadn't granted her permission to play with friends. The Bug was that she wasn't showing up as my child on the X…
I think I'd just try to hijack one at a Microsoft Store, if they have those available to "demo". Though they may have ripped that out for the Vive areas iirc...
In contrast, Steve Jobs was known for randomly answering customer support calls to better understand the customer. http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-c...
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=...
You basically have to pay for Premier Support or find a way to get in touch with a developer out-of-band to get anything fixed. Even going through Premier is a brutal process, as a consumer, try to find a human at Microsoft or just give up. Even if you do pay the ransom for fancy support, you're still way better off trying to find an alternate way to contact someone on the team. Write a blog post, tweet at someone, post on HN or Reddit, whatever.
If you do go through Premier, hope that your bug repros every time with a procedure that takes no more than 5 numbered steps. Anything beyond that, give up. Never ask for advice or assume common sense or anything with any room for interpretation.
Hope that your bug is in something that is about 1 year old. Any newer and support has never touched it and is surprised anyone in the real world uses it. Much older and they won't risk a change.
This has gotten better recently, but be prepared to fill out a lot of questionnaires about why some data corruption bug or memory leak is a problem for your business. These will be insane in context. At one point I had to write 8 pages about why Task Scheduler (their cron, more or less) should run tasks on the defined schedule, as opposed to not running them.
Hope that your issue is in a core-ish server product. The support teams for AD, Exchange and SQL are significantly better than anything client side. Just as long as it's one of these older established products and not something new, if it's new, support won't know what it is.
There are incredibly competent and helpful people in Microsoft's support org. Like fix your bug in a 15 minute phone call after a hundred hour case, cut you a private build and ask you to confirm the fix - competent. I'd estimate there are about 4 of these people in that entire support org, and you don't get to talk to them until you've invested a month or two in escalations and repros.
Oh and answers.microsoft.com is an anti-service. It's like experts exchange in the dark times, only worse. There is no useful information there and it serves only to add noise to your search results.
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…
> 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. Oh bullshit. Anyone who's landed on answers.microsoft.com before and seen what passes for "dialogue" with customers on there knows what you're sayi…