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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

#111

Post by kaleidic »

zie wrote: post #80
schveiguy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or indeed https://github.com/kaleidicassociates/excel-d which schweiguy may find more appealing :)

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#112

Post by int_19h »

johansch wrote: post #9
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".

The real effectiveness comes from having it here on HN (or other popular techie websites). There are enough employees lurking that someone will notice.

Works for most large companies, not just Microsoft.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#113

Post by int_19h »

laktak wrote: post #46

For an example on how it should work look at Bash On Windows. They are really doing a great job there. https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues

The big difference is that WSL is a product that targets developers. These usually have decent reporting channels - for open source stuff, it's just GitHub as usual, and for others there's normally Connect and UserVoice. You can expect actual devs and PMs from the respective product team to keep an eye on those channels.

For consumer products, though, there's no such easy gateways. And you can kinda sorta understand why - the reason why there are all those phone support people who keep suggesting File|New etc is because that's actually what the answer is for most reports.

Perhaps Excel guys should just open a GitHub project and get "advanced" feedback there, on the notion that if you can register an account there without getting intimidated, you probably know what you're talking about.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#114

Post by cyphar »

bubblethink wrote: post #56

That's one great thing I like about RedHat. You don't even need to be their customer to report a bug. And you'll usually get some sort of a response in days.

And it applies not just to RedHat, but also Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu, and so on. Not to mention that every project that your distribution will inevitably work with to fix a problem also works in the open.

I cannot imagine working on a platform that doesn't give you the ability to report bugs directly to the people working on something. Actually, I can't imagine not being able to read the bloody code and figuring out why something is broken in the first place.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#115

Post by alkonaut »

mystere wrote: post #110
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…

The problem here is that historically, bug reporting was linked to tech support because only enterprise customers were expected to report bugs, and those customers were paying for those bugs to be resolved (hotfixes, for instance). Nowadays, Microsoft is asking for bug reports from everyone, but has not fully created a support structure to make that feasible at scale. They seem to be iterating over the problem though…

I can see how a select few enterprises basically have agreements that mean they call their software vendor when they can't get their work done - and the vendor fixes the problem whether it requires a patch or just hand holding.

But having this system only, thinking it can be applied to small business or private customers is beyond naïve. Especially since they lose a free service - the quality bug reports from competent users.

The devdiv is way ahead of the rest at Microsoft - and the OSS bits are basically world leading. So there is certainly hope.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#116

Post by jimbobimbo »

cptskippy wrote: post #18

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…

FYI: from similar past discussions, sometimes it helps to leave some way of contact you either in the post or in the HN account details. It looks like people who work at MS lurk in such threads.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#117

Post by HereBeBeasties »

a_humean wrote: post #103
oblosys wrote: post #27

There are also Microsoft teams that don't put you through such nightmare scenarios though. Last night I submitted a TypeScript bug report, and within 15 minutes it was labeled, added to the next-release milestone, and had someone assigned to it.

Yeah, but who are the users of Typescript? Developers that, by and large, can usually tell the different between a genuine bug and analogous cases of not understanding where the FILE button is. The signal:noise ratio for reported typescript problems is certainly such that its much easier to filter through the issue tracker and find the genuine bugs. People use github issues as tech support quite often, but the users…

So probably the right way to get a bug in Excel fixed is to report it to the typescript team...

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#118

Post by oblosys »

a_humean wrote: post #103
oblosys wrote: post #27

There are also Microsoft teams that don't put you through such nightmare scenarios though. Last night I submitted a TypeScript bug report, and within 15 minutes it was labeled, added to the next-release milestone, and had someone assigned to it.

Yeah, but who are the users of Typescript? Developers that, by and large, can usually tell the different between a genuine bug and analogous cases of not understanding where the FILE button is. The signal:noise ratio for reported typescript problems is certainly such that its much easier to filter through the issue tracker and find the genuine bugs. People use github issues as tech support quite often, but the users…

Well, obviously it's easier here, but just because something is easier doesn't automatically mean resources will be allocated to do it well. I was pleasantly surprised that at least for some newer projects Microsoft seems to do a decent job.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#119

Post by cptskippy »

jimbobimbo wrote: post #116
cptskippy wrote: post #18

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…

FYI: from similar past discussions, sometimes it helps to leave some way of contact you either in the post or in the HN account details. It looks like people who work at MS lurk in such threads.

I generally keep anonymous because I am not looking for any special attention. If someone is going to reach out to me specifically about my experience, I would hope it would be to understand and fix the issues I encountered try to get support and not to placate me because I am being vocal about a bad experience.

Unfortunately every time I have contacted someone who responded to my vocal complaints, they didn't care about the issues I encountered and just wanted to shut me up. This goes for Best Buy, Comcast, UPS, and quite a few other big companies.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#120

Post by ElijahLynn »

perlgeek wrote: post #10
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.

If you get thousands of bug reports a day, then you need to fix those bugs. You can automate them all to go into a queue and group similar ones. This is all solvable. You need to give users a voice. They are the ones who have to use our imperfect software.
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