How to Report a Bug to Microsoft
schveiguy.com
schveiguy.com
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
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...
"To report a bug please open the FILE menu, and click on "Send feedback". Ta-dah.
Support is still shit if they can't do that. In a software-company everyone should know the rough path to actually report a bug, or what looks like one.
I'm going to update my post with more information because actually, there's a lot of great tips from these comments!
Just in case anyone is curious about the product version. It is often under File->Account (->About).
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".
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.
Works for most large companies, not just Microsoft.
It appears, along with all the "help" and FAQ documentation, that the whole thing is setup to be used and managed buy an owner of an xbox.
we dont have or want one. My son has an android device and wants to play on a realms minecraft server which is only possible via a blasted xbox account.
In the end i gave up, so disgusted by MS and the infuriating interface. Luckily my boy's only 9 and happy to move on with something else. but it put right off anything xbox related, and i hold the purse strings.
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?
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. :)
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.
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 corporation of its size, is not a democracy. It is controlled by its shareholders, not by its employees.
Contrary to your point: none of the shareholders had any input on those decisions above (except possibly getting rid of Ballmer post-Nokia...). It's just management playing dice with ideas seemingly without much critical thinking - or at least transparency as to why they decided to press-ahead with a controversial decision.
I guess we still have a long way to go before we make software right.
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 perception has changed wrt Microsoft, in that a comment attacking Microsoft is downvoted! So obviously, they are making positive progress.
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.
But then again, if we refer back to the original article and assume the author is being mostly honest (I believe he is), then are employees working in support who disingenuously transfer people around to "more appropriate" support personnel in a system designed (by management, yes) to get people to give up beyond any criticism, because "it's just their job"? I think that's a valid question.
Point taken I am excessively rude, but good god how will anything get better with quasi-monopolies? My intent, to be honest, is to invoke a feeling of shame to employees who watch this happening and do nothing. I think there's even a famous saying to that effect.
Ironically, a good manager will generally have a pretty solid amount of empathy because that's key to being good at the job. So if it's not okay to crap on engineers (it's not) then it's also not okay to crap on managers.
NB: not affiliated with Microsoft. Edit: Freudian slip.
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 at most a few days. This isn't support - I'm not buying a service from Microsoft I'm providing a service. For free.
Uservoice isn't working. It's a site where you vote on silly feature requests, not a proper bug reporting system where you can actually follow the issue being resolved. The bug report menu item in some products seem to take me to different places each time and differnt products do it differently. (and don't get me started on the people that respond on answers.ms... what is their correctness rate? 5%?)
I'm very happy to see that for a lot of the dev related projects you can now usually get a response on a github issue very quickly.
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, and maybe eventually they'll get it right.
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.
The trick is to set the quality threshold high. It should take a couple of hours to report a bug but that should be because of the effort of writing the issue - not because you navigate tech support phone people.
So basically "I can't do this thing I need to do, although it worked in the last version" is tech support - not a bug report. With the minimal steps to reproduce, some logs and perhaps a vm image - it's s bug report.
These customer support people talk to people like this all day. They can know when an issue is an actual bug.
Getting the bug report to the right dev and eliciting the ever-important "huh, that's weird" is a really tricky routing problem due to Microsoft (and similar companies') scale.
So... maybe... a team could be created, whose sole purpose is to distill potential issues into tiny testcases that take the fewest number of seconds for someone with domain knowledge to look at and go "okay I doubt this is invalid". Not to actually repro the issue (which might require significant setup), but rather to get an initial go/no-go.
Then teams around the company could be routed batches of testcases to look at every couple of days.
I know I'm describing issue tracking here - the specific point I'm getting at is that the first team I mentioned would handle all the back-and-forth with the customer until the testcase was as small as possible.
The caveat emptor with this idea is that it's inspired by a single datapoint (OP's bug report) and may not scale to more nuanced problems. Hardware failure, for example, would fall right through this approach.
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.
It's telling that most of Excel's major new features in the past few releases (e.g. PowerQuery, integration with PowerBI, etc) are all implemented as pop-up "child applications" with their own UI instead of being baked into Excel itself - I wonder how long they'll keep this up before rewriting it entirely.
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!
That said, yes, as a Windows Core PM I do trawl Uservoice (well, I get a push notification of new comments/suggestions) as well as Stack Overflow and Twitter. Seriously - lots of us are on Twitter (just look at @richturn_ms for Bash on Windows) and pretty accessible.
If you want this to be escalated quickly and get the devs involved, create an o365 trial account, make sure it has a null.onmicrosoft.com domain - that's commercial.
For commercial, you're connected to a tech, which is outsource through the typical firms, e.g. Teleperformance, Experis, Unisys, etc -- they don't care but they have an SLA to follow and if you give them negative feedback, the case will be escalated as the team lead will question why they got negative.
For example, a typical agent would have 100-120 cases a month. CSAT can not fall under 92%. Yes, 92%.
Escalations on a negative feedback ticket removes that ticket from that techs queue, so by rating it negative and not letting it be closed will get you the quickest service in terms of escalation because the agent and that agents Team Lead will escalate it to the NEXT team that has meetings with QA and the Dev's in India w/ Wipro and is the quickest way to get it resolved.
Or, just prove that there's a way it can be a security vulnerability and get a 10k check. I would but, I think I'm disqualified.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...
I wouldn't hold my breath. Microsoft is koolaid city.
Hopefully this gets more visibility so it's escalated correctly.
The Bug was that she wasn't showing up as my child on the Xbox website, only on the Microsoft Account website. So I had no way of granting her permissions.
Unfortunately I tried the Chat support feature first. I was bounced around between Microsoft Support, Microsoft Account Support, Xbox Account Support, and Xbox Support numerous times. Eventually I was told to go fill out a form with a provided support number and that someone would email me.
When I finally received an email it contained links to the knowledge base article I'd found myself and had walked through with support numerous times already. I was even told a different points that I needed to Contact Apple and Mojang about the issue.
After an evening of this I decided to call. I was on the phone for about 2 hours with a guy while we went through all the same gyrations I had done before with Chat support. Thankfully he didn't try to pawn me off on anyone or transfer me to another department.
After eventually conceding that it wasn't user error and in fact a bug, he said he would submit it as a bug and sent me a link to a page where I could view the status of my support case.
The linked page is mostly useless as it is just a log of the emails I exchanged with Microsoft Support however it does have an obscure Status field. I never followed back up on the issue until a week ago when my kid asked about Minecraft again. I checked the Xbox Account website and miraculously I could change her permissions!
For shits and giggles I just opened up the support link I was emailed and the Status is now showing as "New -> TroubleShoot -> Closed". So yay!
I still haven't gotten a response from Microsoft Support about who I should contact at Apple about my issue though...
* I almost forgot! At one point the Xbox team wanted me to log into an Xbox One to try and adjust the privacy settings there. Only problem was that I don't own an Xbox One so they suggested that I some how come upon one on my own because they were confident it would solve my issue.
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...
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.
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??
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.
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.
(It also resulted in my first start-up getting funded.)
People use github issues as tech support quite often, but the users of excel are nothing like users of Typescript.
10 years ago they were wonky about engineer assignment but excellent. 20 years ago a guy would be on an airplane for a crit sit.
Now, forget it. It seems like the KPI they care about isn't resolution, but getting issues dumped to the next queue.
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.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...
> Secondly, what an ignorant unhelpful error message is this? What is the error? In which rule it is? How do I fix it? The message could have equally read "F... YOU!", it would be equally unhelpful and rude!
Funny, wildly different times, I don't think github was even popular (existed?) back then.
http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/
I don't think they've changed their fundamental attitude to their customers in the following years.
It's understandable that one of the differences with the greatly discounted non commercial use office home license is lesser support than the more expensive commercial license is entitled to. Support is expensive.
It didn't help that were all Swedes and the vast majority of the users were Russian/Indonesian/Nigerian/Indian. Language-specific ML could definitely have helped nowadays, but this was 2005.
Another aspect:
The content was so "inappropriate" that we felt that we coulnd't really recruit young/cheap people with the proper language skills to watch these feedback channels. It just felt.. well, wrong.
Here's a lesson: if you build a browser and target it to people who have not been exposed to the Internet before, most users will use it to access porn. Not wikipedia.org, un.org etc. Very, very hard-core porn.
(We did notice that they actually started looking for things besides porn after a couple of years, though! I guess it's something people have to go through...)
In the beginning, I mean. Quite soon we also had norwegian team members, and a few years later some polish team members, and so on. Language mis-match still was most certainly an issue though.
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.
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.
After or alongside those come the support and development teams of free (speech) software that I use. After that, certain developers of non-free software. As an exercise for the student, guess where Microsoft comes in that list.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-c...
A couple of months ago I sent an email about a bug in the iBooks iPhone App directly to Tim Cook. A couple of days later, an Apple PM responsible for the iBooks App sent me a mail telling me to describe the problem a bit more precise. I offered to take a video and sent it to him. It went back and forth a bit (but always the same person!) and in the next iOS patch the bug was fixed.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=...
- Microsoft
The reason you are all using MS Excel today.
Likely apocryphal: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...
Still, it took years for 123 to really fade away, at which point Lotus was all about Notes.
Source: I worked on the X (Open Look and Motif) versions of 123 around 1990-1992.
Kudos to the team that got it to work, though: at the time it was probably the biggest C++ PC program ever.