4 ms·

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.

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.
mistermann 9y ago
> I remember that MVPs and PMs would absolutely trawl those forums looking for user-reported bugs and trying to help get them workarounds & fix the root-cause bug. YMMV of course, but many members of the team spent time every week looking for primary-source user feedback. Oh bullshit. Anyone who's landed on answers.microsoft.com before and seen what passes for "dialogue" with customers on there knows what you're saying isn't true. I don't have any links handy (I abandoned any hope years ago on Microsoft caring about fixing bugs in products), but there are numerous extremely well documented bugs in SQL Server (just as one example) that have been open in some cases for over 7 years!
- discreditable 9y ago
  Agreed. Easily ⅔ of the time I land on answers.microsoft.com, the MSFT response marked as answer is "run sfc /scannow" or "Try a clean boot".
  - cube00 9y ago
    Don't forget how sorry they are to hear it and that they will most happy to assist with your problem.
- hirsin 9y ago
  Answers/Uservoice depend heavily on the team. I know the Windows IoTCore team is pretty heavily invested in their outreach on Answers and Twitter, and any issues reported there are triaged and then brought to the team's attention. I've seen regressions in our product reported on Answers and then brought to our attention within hours. 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.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    Some teams (PowerBI, for one) have embraced the new customer service culture, others seem to still have the old "FU, pay me" culture. Pretending otherwise (not pointing the finger at you, but at MSFT management) to me just adds insult to injury.
schveiguy 9y ago
Thanks for the information. I indeed was, after 80 minutes of phone call, not quite in a "listening" mood. I actually kind of felt bad yelling at the last person after hanging up -- it wasn't her fault I was chucked around for over an hour. I think definitely I will be more apt to try other avenues if I find another bug in the future.

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.

mistermann 9y ago

> I remember that MVPs and PMs would absolutely trawl those forums looking for user-reported bugs and trying to help get them workarounds & fix the root-cause bug. YMMV of course, but many members of the team spent time every week looking for primary-source user feedback. Oh bullshit. Anyone who's landed on answers.microsoft.com before and seen what passes for "dialogue" with customers on there knows what you're saying isn't true. I don't have any links handy (I abandoned any hope years ago on Microsoft caring about fixing bugs in products), but there are numerous extremely well documented bugs in SQL Server (just as one example) that have been open in some cases for over 7 years!

discreditable 9y ago
Agreed. Easily ⅔ of the time I land on answers.microsoft.com, the MSFT response marked as answer is "run sfc /scannow" or "Try a clean boot".
- cube00 9y ago
  Don't forget how sorry they are to hear it and that they will most happy to assist with your problem.
hirsin 9y ago
Answers/Uservoice depend heavily on the team. I know the Windows IoTCore team is pretty heavily invested in their outreach on Answers and Twitter, and any issues reported there are triaged and then brought to the team's attention. I've seen regressions in our product reported on Answers and then brought to our attention within hours. 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.
- mistermann 9y ago
  Some teams (PowerBI, for one) have embraced the new customer service culture, others seem to still have the old "FU, pay me" culture. Pretending otherwise (not pointing the finger at you, but at MSFT management) to me just adds insult to injury.

schveiguy 9y ago

Thanks for the information. I indeed was, after 80 minutes of phone call, not quite in a "listening" mood. I actually kind of felt bad yelling at the last person after hanging up -- it wasn't her fault I was chucked around for over an hour. I think definitely I will be more apt to try other avenues if I find another bug in the future.