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How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

403 points by Sujan 9y ago

doggydogs94 9y ago
At level 7 you lost. They got you off the phone. I usually allocate a half a day to these types of efforts. Hopefully I am not overly critical, but it appears you have spent much more time complaining about the MS support process than just biting the bullet and spending the whole day on the phone.
jpswade 9y ago
What about this? https://office365.uservoice.com/ https://office365.uservoice.com/
- 13of40 9y ago
  Even better: https://excel.uservoice.com/ https://excel.uservoice.com/
ElijahLynn 9y ago
That was fantastic!!! And to think, all they have to do is have a "report bug" item in the help menu.
- perlgeek 9y ago
  ... 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.
  - ElijahLynn 9y ago
    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.
- shmed 9y ago
  Which they do. There is absolutely a report bug item in the help menu. There's a full "Feedback" section in the menu made exactly for this purpose.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    So it's under Help > Feedback > Report Bug ?
- johansch 9y ago
  We did this with Opera Mini. I think it could have worked, sorta, if we had staffed this properly (meaning 50/50 on tech support/development. we weren't in a position to do that). But only early on. The early users were kinda techie (beta users were great! smart people who could speak english!), so it worked decently well until we reached like 1M MAUs. At 250M MAUs it was just random noise to a human. And the volume was insane. 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...)
  - johansch 9y ago
    > It didn't help that were all Swedes 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.
jbob2000 9y ago
>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 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??
- devopsproject 9y ago
  because some phb only understands excel.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  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.
- schveiguy 9y ago
  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.
  - mrmondo 9y ago
    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.
  - zie 9y ago
    You can use actual programming languages to beat up excel: http://www.python-excel.org/ 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.
Namrog84 9y ago
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 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/ 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 https://answers.microsoft.com as mentioned by mherdeg
- johansch 9y ago
  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".
  - cperciva 9y ago
    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.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    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.
- lucb1e 9y ago
  > 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?
mherdeg 9y ago
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_excel 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  Heh, the Web Query feature in Excel hasn't been significantly touched since it was introduced in Office 97 (or was it 2000?) - I know because when I was at MS a few years ago I reported a bad bug in the Web Query feature - it wasn't a regression, just something inherent in the fact they're stuck using the old Trident MSHTML engine and so the Web Query feature was broken for newer websites - they closed my bug as a WONTFIX because it wasn't a regression - even though the state of that tool in Excel gets worse each year Chrome's usage figures go up... I contacted one of the devs on the team seeking an explanation, he summarized it as stale code no-one wanted to touch without risking breaking anything. 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.
DamonHD 9y ago
Ah! Many many moons ago when MS refused to even answer the phone I ended up in frustration telexing (yep!) a guy in MS HQ who turned out to be called Bill Gates, and dramatic things happened quite quickly. That's what we used to do before blog posts... (It also resulted in my first start-up getting funded.)
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  Is this story available in more detail somewhere?
  - DamonHD 9y ago
    Only generally after a few pints... B^>
agrona 9y ago
The real trick is to know somebody who works on the product. Seems to be the only way I've ever seen any bug get reported and fixed.
- Antrikshy 9y ago
  This is my favorite part about working at a big tech company. It's easy to find the right team and get them to fix highly specific things.
- nercury 9y ago
  I remember submitting an early preview F# bug directly to dev email which I got together with compiler crash message related to some obscure attribute handling situation. I remember being very surprised that I could do it, and more so when I got a response! That was the first time I realized there are people like me behind this faceless Microsoft machine. Funny, wildly different times, I don't think github was even popular (existed?) back then.
partycoder 9y ago
"DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run". - Microsoft The reason you are all using MS Excel today.
- throwawaykf09 9y ago
  > "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run". Likely apocryphal: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...
- bboreham 9y ago
  Nah; Lotus got very defocused on new C++ and cross-platform spreadsheets. Maybe Microsoft misled them on the relative importance of OS/2 vs Windows, but to my eyes it was a classic case of too much money leading to a focus on abstract high-level issues leading to bad software. 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.
  - partycoder 9y ago
    What are your thoughts on Quattro Pro?
    - bboreham 9y ago
      I don't believe I've ever set eyes on it running. Kudos to the team that got it to work, though: at the time it was probably the biggest C++ PC program ever.
cptskippy 9y ago
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 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.
- posguy 9y ago
  I'm trying to think of where I could even drum up an Xbox One, but I think I'd be up a creek without a paddle myself. None of my friends own one (though they own 360's and PS4's) and none of the MS employees I know own a Xbox One. 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...
alkonaut 9y ago
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 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.
- yellow_postit 9y ago
  How do you propose filtering tech support from bug reports at scale?
  - SolarNet 9y ago
    Letting customer support people push a button that says "This person appears to have an actual bug" that reports it to a specialized customer support team with some technical knowledge to be able to report it. These customer support people talk to people like this all day. They can know when an issue is an actual bug.
    - i336_ 9y ago
      Hmmm. 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.
partycoder 9y ago
In contrast, Steve Jobs was known for randomly answering customer support calls to better understand the customer. http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-customer-service/ http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-c...
- marczellm 9y ago
  Bill Gates did too: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=15943 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=...
- chmanie 9y ago
  It still works :) 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.
- garganzol 9y ago
  Satya Nadella does not. He is busy "engaging with cloud-first experiences widening the mobile satisfaction among diverse platforms across the boards of world-wide decision makers". Or something like that, the point is: CEOs like him are completely missing the customers' reality. They are, literally, in the clouds of corporate nirvana until customer base is starting to die off.
sonyakop 9y ago
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/ 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.
- schveiguy 9y ago
  Thank you. I should probably have tried those too. It would be a good idea to instruct your support people to refer to those places for bug reporting.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
  With all due respect, I don't think you're correct regarding questions about disabling Windows 10 telemetry.
oblosys 9y ago
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.
- efrafa 9y ago
  Probably because its open source and on github.
- a_humean 9y ago
  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 of excel are nothing like users of Typescript.
  - HereBeBeasties 9y ago
    So probably the right way to get a bug in Excel fixed is to report it to the typescript team...
  - oblosys 9y ago
    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.
Spooky23 9y ago
I get the same nonsense and runaround as a Premier customer. 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.
- nikanj 9y ago
  Inbox zero meets bug tracking
labster 9y ago
One of the best shaggy dog stories I've read in a long time. As a work of creative writing, well done.
laktak 9y ago
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 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues
- gwern 9y ago
  That reminds me of the Halloween Memos and Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Commandline". The MS writer dabbles a little in this new 'open source' thing and reports back that he's astonished he can just open a bug! And even submit a patch! Even as a professional Windows user he admits being a little seduced by it. And Stephenson notes the contrast between the Debian bugtracking system and MS Windows's opacity.
  - duncan_bayne 9y ago
    I spent ten years or so as a Windows developer. I've experienced the difference between the MS bug reporting process, and the ability to raise an issue on an open source tool then fix it with a pull request. There's no way I'd ever go back.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Yeah but this is a new project with a team actively developping it. Office is kind of more in maintenance mode, where almost no new features get added between versions. So you probably don't have the same resources behind focusing on improving the code.
- int_19h 9y ago
  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.
mpw222 9y ago
My 2 cents having gotten about 10 bugs in Microsoft products (mostly Windows and Office, some server, some client, some kernel mode, some user mode): 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.
bubblethink 9y ago
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.
- cyphar 9y ago
  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.
foobarbazetc 9y ago
Still waiting for Microsoft to fix this huge bug in Edge for over a year: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/7134034/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor... I wouldn't hold my breath. Microsoft is koolaid city.
- alphast0rm 9y ago
  Wow--props for your persistence. I thought the original blog post was bad. Hopefully this gets more visibility so it's escalated correctly.
- mhermher 9y ago
  I gave it 3 votes on uservoice for you. Good luck.
505 9y ago
I report bugs sometimes. I develop and test software for a living, and so my paying clients come first. This includes both software they are using and relevant tools that I am using in order to help the clients. 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.
duncan_bayne 9y ago
It bears repeating: this is how Microsoft saw the open source movement back in the day: http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/ http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/ I don't think they've changed their fundamental attitude to their customers in the following years.
known 9y ago
Its due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence
mlk84 9y ago
:-|
rootsudo 9y ago
As someone that use to work in Enterprise and prior in SMB for o365, you are caught in a trap because Home users aren't treated the same way. 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.
megamindbrian 9y ago
I feel like the entire world is ignoring me.
kyberias 9y ago
Ok, so this was just a silly rant.
- flai 9y ago
  Well, considering he got an internal dev to report this issue... Not so silly :)
dandare 9y ago
I have reported a bizarre Outlook bug 18 months ago and I am still getting updates from desperate people slamming their heads into the same wall. Microsoft could not physically give less fuck (Plank-fuck?). https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_outlook-mso_mac/outlook-for-mac-error-message-rules-could-not-be/920e81ae-aa68-40d9-88a9-ae380a950919 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!
topbagsvk 9y ago
So I had no way of granting her permissions. http://www.bagsforsalefr.com/hermes.html http://www.bagsforsalefr.com/hermes.html
redm 9y ago
I've had the same experience, with Comcast... What these companies don't understand is that good CS can make a customer for life, or the opposite.
mattnewport 9y ago
I didn't follow the part where you couldn't give them a Microsoft id for a commercial office 365 license. Presumably you were giving them your personal Microsoft id used with office 365 home at home for your own personal non commercial use? Why did you not just give them the id for the commercial office license your company must have to use office for commercial purposes? 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.

403 points by Sujan 9y ago

At level 7 you lost. They got you off the phone. I usually allocate a half a day to these types of efforts. Hopefully I am not overly critical, but it appears you have spent much more time complaining about the MS support process than just biting the bullet and spending the whole day on the phone.

jpswade 9y ago

What about this? https://office365.uservoice.com/ https://office365.uservoice.com/

13of40 9y ago
Even better: https://excel.uservoice.com/ https://excel.uservoice.com/

ElijahLynn 9y ago

That was fantastic!!! And to think, all they have to do is have a "report bug" item in the help menu.

perlgeek 9y ago
... 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.
- ElijahLynn 9y ago
  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.
shmed 9y ago
Which they do. There is absolutely a report bug item in the help menu. There's a full "Feedback" section in the menu made exactly for this purpose.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  So it's under Help > Feedback > Report Bug ?
johansch 9y ago
We did this with Opera Mini. I think it could have worked, sorta, if we had staffed this properly (meaning 50/50 on tech support/development. we weren't in a position to do that). But only early on. The early users were kinda techie (beta users were great! smart people who could speak english!), so it worked decently well until we reached like 1M MAUs. At 250M MAUs it was just random noise to a human. And the volume was insane. 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...)
- johansch 9y ago
  > It didn't help that were all Swedes 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.

jbob2000 9y ago

>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 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??

devopsproject 9y ago
because some phb only understands excel.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
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.
schveiguy 9y ago
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.
- mrmondo 9y ago
  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.
- zie 9y ago
  You can use actual programming languages to beat up excel: http://www.python-excel.org/ 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.

Namrog84 9y ago

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 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/ 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 https://answers.microsoft.com as mentioned by mherdeg

johansch 9y ago
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".
- cperciva 9y ago
  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.
- int_19h 9y ago
  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.
lucb1e 9y ago
> 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?

mherdeg 9y ago

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_excel 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.

DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
Heh, the Web Query feature in Excel hasn't been significantly touched since it was introduced in Office 97 (or was it 2000?) - I know because when I was at MS a few years ago I reported a bad bug in the Web Query feature - it wasn't a regression, just something inherent in the fact they're stuck using the old Trident MSHTML engine and so the Web Query feature was broken for newer websites - they closed my bug as a WONTFIX because it wasn't a regression - even though the state of that tool in Excel gets worse each year Chrome's usage figures go up... I contacted one of the devs on the team seeking an explanation, he summarized it as stale code no-one wanted to touch without risking breaking anything. 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.

DamonHD 9y ago

Ah! Many many moons ago when MS refused to even answer the phone I ended up in frustration telexing (yep!) a guy in MS HQ who turned out to be called Bill Gates, and dramatic things happened quite quickly. That's what we used to do before blog posts... (It also resulted in my first start-up getting funded.)

colejohnson66 9y ago
Is this story available in more detail somewhere?
- DamonHD 9y ago
  Only generally after a few pints... B^>

agrona 9y ago

The real trick is to know somebody who works on the product. Seems to be the only way I've ever seen any bug get reported and fixed.

Antrikshy 9y ago
This is my favorite part about working at a big tech company. It's easy to find the right team and get them to fix highly specific things.
nercury 9y ago
I remember submitting an early preview F# bug directly to dev email which I got together with compiler crash message related to some obscure attribute handling situation. I remember being very surprised that I could do it, and more so when I got a response! That was the first time I realized there are people like me behind this faceless Microsoft machine. Funny, wildly different times, I don't think github was even popular (existed?) back then.

partycoder 9y ago

"DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run". - Microsoft The reason you are all using MS Excel today.

throwawaykf09 9y ago
> "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run". Likely apocryphal: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...
bboreham 9y ago
Nah; Lotus got very defocused on new C++ and cross-platform spreadsheets. Maybe Microsoft misled them on the relative importance of OS/2 vs Windows, but to my eyes it was a classic case of too much money leading to a focus on abstract high-level issues leading to bad software. 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.
- partycoder 9y ago
  What are your thoughts on Quattro Pro?
  - bboreham 9y ago
    I don't believe I've ever set eyes on it running. Kudos to the team that got it to work, though: at the time it was probably the biggest C++ PC program ever.

cptskippy 9y ago

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 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.

posguy 9y ago
I'm trying to think of where I could even drum up an Xbox One, but I think I'd be up a creek without a paddle myself. None of my friends own one (though they own 360's and PS4's) and none of the MS employees I know own a Xbox One. 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...

alkonaut 9y ago

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 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.

yellow_postit 9y ago
How do you propose filtering tech support from bug reports at scale?
- SolarNet 9y ago
  Letting customer support people push a button that says "This person appears to have an actual bug" that reports it to a specialized customer support team with some technical knowledge to be able to report it. These customer support people talk to people like this all day. They can know when an issue is an actual bug.
  - i336_ 9y ago
    Hmmm. 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.

partycoder 9y ago

In contrast, Steve Jobs was known for randomly answering customer support calls to better understand the customer. http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-customer-service/ http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-c...

marczellm 9y ago
Bill Gates did too: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=15943 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=...
chmanie 9y ago
It still works :) 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.
garganzol 9y ago
Satya Nadella does not. He is busy "engaging with cloud-first experiences widening the mobile satisfaction among diverse platforms across the boards of world-wide decision makers". Or something like that, the point is: CEOs like him are completely missing the customers' reality. They are, literally, in the clouds of corporate nirvana until customer base is starting to die off.

sonyakop 9y ago

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/ 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.

schveiguy 9y ago
Thank you. I should probably have tried those too. It would be a good idea to instruct your support people to refer to those places for bug reporting.
DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
With all due respect, I don't think you're correct regarding questions about disabling Windows 10 telemetry.

oblosys 9y ago

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.

efrafa 9y ago
Probably because its open source and on github.
a_humean 9y ago
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 of excel are nothing like users of Typescript.
- HereBeBeasties 9y ago
  So probably the right way to get a bug in Excel fixed is to report it to the typescript team...
- oblosys 9y ago
  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.

Spooky23 9y ago

I get the same nonsense and runaround as a Premier customer. 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.

nikanj 9y ago
Inbox zero meets bug tracking

labster 9y ago

One of the best shaggy dog stories I've read in a long time. As a work of creative writing, well done.

laktak 9y ago

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 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues

gwern 9y ago
That reminds me of the Halloween Memos and Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Commandline". The MS writer dabbles a little in this new 'open source' thing and reports back that he's astonished he can just open a bug! And even submit a patch! Even as a professional Windows user he admits being a little seduced by it. And Stephenson notes the contrast between the Debian bugtracking system and MS Windows's opacity.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  I spent ten years or so as a Windows developer. I've experienced the difference between the MS bug reporting process, and the ability to raise an issue on an open source tool then fix it with a pull request. There's no way I'd ever go back.
cm2187 9y ago
Yeah but this is a new project with a team actively developping it. Office is kind of more in maintenance mode, where almost no new features get added between versions. So you probably don't have the same resources behind focusing on improving the code.
int_19h 9y ago
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.

mpw222 9y ago

My 2 cents having gotten about 10 bugs in Microsoft products (mostly Windows and Office, some server, some client, some kernel mode, some user mode): 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.

bubblethink 9y ago

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.

cyphar 9y ago
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.

foobarbazetc 9y ago

Still waiting for Microsoft to fix this huge bug in Edge for over a year: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/7134034/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor... I wouldn't hold my breath. Microsoft is koolaid city.

alphast0rm 9y ago
Wow--props for your persistence. I thought the original blog post was bad. Hopefully this gets more visibility so it's escalated correctly.
mhermher 9y ago
I gave it 3 votes on uservoice for you. Good luck.

505 9y ago

I report bugs sometimes. I develop and test software for a living, and so my paying clients come first. This includes both software they are using and relevant tools that I am using in order to help the clients. 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.

duncan_bayne 9y ago

It bears repeating: this is how Microsoft saw the open source movement back in the day: http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/ http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/ I don't think they've changed their fundamental attitude to their customers in the following years.

known 9y ago

Its due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence

mlk84 9y ago

:-|

rootsudo 9y ago

As someone that use to work in Enterprise and prior in SMB for o365, you are caught in a trap because Home users aren't treated the same way. 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.

megamindbrian 9y ago

I feel like the entire world is ignoring me.

kyberias 9y ago

Ok, so this was just a silly rant.

flai 9y ago
Well, considering he got an internal dev to report this issue... Not so silly :)

dandare 9y ago

I have reported a bizarre Outlook bug 18 months ago and I am still getting updates from desperate people slamming their heads into the same wall. Microsoft could not physically give less fuck (Plank-fuck?). https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_outlook-mso_mac/outlook-for-mac-error-message-rules-could-not-be/920e81ae-aa68-40d9-88a9-ae380a950919 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!

topbagsvk 9y ago

So I had no way of granting her permissions. http://www.bagsforsalefr.com/hermes.html http://www.bagsforsalefr.com/hermes.html

redm 9y ago

I've had the same experience, with Comcast... What these companies don't understand is that good CS can make a customer for life, or the opposite.

mattnewport 9y ago

I didn't follow the part where you couldn't give them a Microsoft id for a commercial office 365 license. Presumably you were giving them your personal Microsoft id used with office 365 home at home for your own personal non commercial use? Why did you not just give them the id for the commercial office license your company must have to use office for commercial purposes? 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.