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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

#21

Post by meatbundragon »

lucb1e wrote: post #17
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.…

> 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)

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#22

Post by mistermann »

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.…

I don't mean any personal disrespect, but I mostly don't believe you. Well sure, maybe in some divisions a few people (through a personal effort rather than corporate policy) look at these things and try to make good software, but outside of a few teams (PowerBI for example) I truly believe Microsoft is still primarily just about money and market share.

As a company, Microsoft's official goal is not to make good software, but good enough software.

There are thousands of passionate users of Microsoft software users out there who are gladly willing to do a large part of what your job is: identify and document bugs, and they are willing to jump through extensive hoops to reproduce something so it can get fixed and stop disrupting their workflow, all we ask from Microsoft is that they do the final step: fix it! But no, even that is too much to ask.

And I say this as a relative Microsoft fanboy.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#24

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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 anyone can edit, and probably understand, it. Same reason hedge funds and banks calculate so much through Excel. Contrast that with a service which someone has to maintain, keep up to date, document, et cetera.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#25

Post by cperciva »

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".

filtering out the, ahem, "idiots"

Not relevant to this specific case, but: For smaller companies I've found that "I got your phone number from your domain whois" is a very effective shibboleth.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#26

Post by sonyakop »

I would agree with Namrog84 (yes, I'm an MS employee). Also, the Excel UserVoice should allow you to report bugs and I would say should be your first stop for any issues that you encounter (https://excel.uservoice.com/).

Also, I worked as a Product Manager (Marketing) in the Office division for about 3 years, and honestly if you find folks who you know in Marketing, we're all about community and are willing to help get you the right resources and to the right people, regardless if it's our product that you're having trouble with.

Finally, I know for a fact that the marketing and engineering teams are actively engaged on StackOverflow, so if you were able to post something there, they will find it and respond.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#27

Post by oblosys »

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.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#28

Post by mistermann »

mherdeg wrote: post #7

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 saying isn't true. I don't have any links handy (I abandoned any hope years ago on Microsoft caring about fixing bugs in products), but there are numerous extremely well documented bugs in SQL Server (just as one example) that have been open in some cases for over 7 years!

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#29

Post by schveiguy »

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 just used to be so simple...

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#30

Post by [deleted] »

mistermann wrote: post #22
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.…

I don't mean any personal disrespect, but I mostly don't believe you. Well sure, maybe in some divisions a few people (through a personal effort rather than corporate policy) look at these things and try to make good software, but outside of a few teams (PowerBI for example) I truly believe Microsoft is still primarily just about money and market share. As a company, Microsoft's official goal is not to make good soft…

[deleted]
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