9 ms·

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 any

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?
- meatbundragon 9y ago
  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)
  - dave5104 9y ago
    It's a book by Dave Eggers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) 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. :)
mistermann 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  > 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.
  - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
    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.
schveiguy 9y ago
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...
- Mz 9y ago
  Proof of concept. You win.
- agentdrtran 9y ago
  Not to excuse Microsoft here, but it's in a giant button marked "Feedback". Come on.
  - flai 9y ago
    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.
  - schveiguy 9y ago
    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!
  - chmars 9y ago
    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.
- Namrog84 9y ago
Pxtl 9y ago
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.
- jakob223 9y ago
  But this was a case of a bug which specifically broke backwards compatibility.
senectus1 9y ago
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.

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?

meatbundragon 9y ago
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)
- dave5104 9y ago
  It's a book by Dave Eggers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) 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. :)

mistermann 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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loup-vaillant 9y ago
> 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  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.

schveiguy 9y ago

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...

Mz 9y ago
Proof of concept. You win.
agentdrtran 9y ago
Not to excuse Microsoft here, but it's in a giant button marked "Feedback". Come on.
- flai 9y ago
  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.
- schveiguy 9y ago
  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!
- chmars 9y ago
  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.
Namrog84 9y ago

Pxtl 9y ago

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.

jakob223 9y ago
But this was a case of a bug which specifically broke backwards compatibility.

senectus1 9y ago

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.