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Comment by namrog84 | Hacker News Reader

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.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

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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...

Not to excuse Microsoft here, but it's in a giant button marked "Feedback". Come on.

Well, the L1-Support could have said that:

"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 have given feedback many times (and on the same bugs) with zero results – I have never received a feedback and the reported bugs are still present … it is less frustrating to use workarounds.

Mea Culpa. I installed 2016 to try and find the issue with my system, I haven't searched around the UI for bug reporting tools, didn't even know Microsoft had added them. Just found it now, indeed it looks quite useful.

I'm going to update my post with more information because actually, there's a lot of great tips from these comments!

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.

>I spent about 5 minutes looking ... to figure out what version of office they had

Just in case anyone is curious about the product version. It is often under File->Account (->About).

e.g. http://i.imgur.com/nIo4d2l.png

Proof of concept. You win.

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.

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.

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.

you guys REALLY need to do something about your "user profile" management. I spent weeks trying to figure out why I couldn't manage my sons xbox account (as the designated family leader). I ended up giving up.

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.

> 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 book by Dave Eggers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)

It's a dystopic novel focused on an employee at a tech company modeled after Google/Facebook... except taking their data ventures even farther. :)

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.

> 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 corporation of its size, is not a democracy. It is controlled by its shareholders, not by its employees.

In my experience while I worked there (on Visual Studio and Chakra) it felt like all the major bad decisions were being made at the upper-levels of management - things like the original Windows 8 sandboxed XAML "Apps", the Surface RT, killing VB6 without giving users a clear exit strategy, the decision not to market Zune internationally, making Windows XP look like a toddler's Fischer-Price toy, or the Terri Schiavo-like treatment of Windows Phone - but conversely it's also where good decisions come from (Bash on Windows, Docker support, SQL Server for Linux).

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.

My, I guess I wasn't pessimistic enough. I mean, a bunch of evil investors trying to squeeze money out of a company is one thing, but now you're telling me plain incompetence is enough?

I guess we still have a long way to go before we make software right.

Notice the good decisions came later than the bad decisions in the list.

I guess like Dumbledore says "In fact, being rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huge"

> 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 perception has changed wrt Microsoft, in that a comment attacking Microsoft is downvoted! So obviously, they are making positive progress.

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.

I can see how it could be easily misinterpreted, but I think if you read what I said, I was pointing my finger at Microsoft the company.

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.

Erm. This may be a nitpick, but managers are people and as such we have actual, real feelings.

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.

I actually wrote my poorly written wishlist for Satya partly in response to Scott Hanselman's post. The most important of these right now are probably patents. I have this submission on FAT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13896891

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