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How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

schveiguy.com

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Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#71

Post by mhermher »

mistermann wrote: post #62
loup-vaillant wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe in some divisions a few people […] try to make good software, but […] I truly believe Microsoft is still primarily just about money and market share. I bet this is even worse: we can have most people at Microsoft trying to make good software (or good customer support, or good whatever they're doing), and still having the company as a whole being about just making money. Because Microsoft, just like any corpor…

> It is controlled by its shareholders, not by its employees. It is controlled by management, shareholders don't have any input, especially at this level of detail. Employees I think NOW (in some divisions) have input, but it is still in pockets. Ask yourself this: do you think Scott Hanselman happiness level with the "new Microsoft" is better/worse/unchanged? NOTE: It's really interesting to see how much public perc…

It's being downvoted because it is really mean spirited, in case it wasn't obvious to you. You know there are MS engineers reading this thread, and your comment is essentially shitting on them and saying that they don't have any pride in their work.

It's one thing to shit on management or whatever, but your comment reads at least in part as a very serious dig at the actual employees. And it's just a really shitty thing to say to someone.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#72

Post by mrmondo »

schveiguy wrote: post #29
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.…

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 used it a lot on Outlook for Mac and it's still dreadful software, I could give long list a problems with it but I have to just lump it in with the quality I've come to expect from Microsoft, regardless - from the 50 odd feedback reports I provided, I never received a link to a bug report or any thanks for testing and reporting on their (expensive!) software and 5 years later it still performs terribly, uses an excessive amount of network activity when idle, fails to properly render HTML, inserts bloated HTML junk into emails, crashes, misses basic features, leaks memory and wastes screen realestate.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#73

Post by nradov »

yellow_postit wrote: post #41
alkonaut wrote: post #20

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?

The only practical way to do it is to have multiple tiers of tech support where tier-1 escalates anything that looks like a potential defect to tier-2/3. And then you have to build your employee compensation structure so that those upper-tier support analysts are at least partly rewarded for the number of valid defects they file, not just for how many support tickets they close.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#75

Post by mrmondo »

schveiguy wrote: post #33
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…

It's... complicated :) Mostly because utility companies insist on Excel for exchange of energy calculations. And even more importantly, because it was WAY WAY better than the previous iteration. Don't make me talk about it.

I feel your pain and too don't want to talk about it, the problem is the software 'corporates' think they should be using isn't what they should be using due to people in non-technical roles making technical decisions.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#76

Post by Pxtl »

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.…

Realistically, for an old program like Excel, is it even possible to get bad-but-consistent behavior fixed? For example, I keep getting frustrated with teh bone-headed behavior when pasting dates in yyyy-MM-dd format into a blank spreadsheet and getting them mangled into an incoherent decimal number. But I'm assuming something like that has a historical reason and MS never wants to break backwards compatibility.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#77

Post by jakob223 »

Pxtl wrote: post #76
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.…

Realistically, for an old program like Excel, is it even possible to get bad-but-consistent behavior fixed? For example, I keep getting frustrated with teh bone-headed behavior when pasting dates in yyyy-MM-dd format into a blank spreadsheet and getting them mangled into an incoherent decimal number. But I'm assuming something like that has a historical reason and MS never wants to break backwards compatibility.

But this was a case of a bug which specifically broke backwards compatibility.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#80

Post by zie »

schveiguy wrote: post #33
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…

It's... complicated :) Mostly because utility companies insist on Excel for exchange of energy calculations. And even more importantly, because it was WAY WAY better than the previous iteration. Don't make me talk about it.

You can use actual programming languages to beat up excel: http://www.python-excel.org/ (I'm sure other languages can beat up excel too)

I'm not saying it's a fix for this particular use case, but I couldn't imagine having to manually update a bunch of excel sheets regularly.. talk about a nightmare. ack.

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