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 :)
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.
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...
"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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
The problem here is that historically, bug reporting was linked to tech support because only enterprise customers were expected to report bugs, and those customers were paying for those bugs to be resolved (hotfixes, for instance).
Nowadays, Microsoft is asking for bug reports from everyone, but has not fully created a support structure to make that feasible at scale. They seem to be iterating over the problem though, and maybe eventually they'll get it right.
I can see how a select few enterprises basically have agreements that mean they call their software vendor when they can't get their work done - and the vendor fixes the problem whether it requires a patch or just hand holding.
But having this system only, thinking it can be applied to small business or private customers is beyond naïve. Especially since they lose a free service - the quality bug reports from competent users.
The devdiv is way ahead of the rest at Microsoft - and the OSS bits are basically world leading. So there is certainly hope.
A bug report comes with steps to reproduce, attached logs etc. Just having a team first to throw out everything from the issue reporting that doesn't meet the issue quality requirements, next a team of second line support actually reproduce the bugs and make proper work items to be prioritized - or close them as "duplicate", "can't reproduce" or similar - which the reporter gets within just a couple of days.
The trick is to set the quality threshold high. It should take a couple of hours to report a bug but that should be because of the effort of writing the issue - not because you navigate tech support phone people.
So basically "I can't do this thing I need to do, although it worked in the last version" is tech support - not a bug report. With the minimal steps to reproduce, some logs and perhaps a vm image - it's s bug report.
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.
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.
The only practical way to do it is to have multiple tiers of tech support where tier-1 escalates anything that looks like a potential defect to tier-2/3. And then you have to build your employee compensation structure so that those upper-tier support analysts are at least partly rewarded for the number of valid defects they file, not just for how many support tickets they close.
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_... , 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
Oh, come on! Why did you have to ruin the fun? Don't you know we can have a ton of fun chuckling sarcastically to ourselves when we see folks like GP keep making these kind of shockingly delusional statements?
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.
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.
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.
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...
FYI: from similar past discussions, sometimes it helps to leave some way of contact you either in the post or in the HN account details. It looks like people who work at MS lurk in such threads.
I generally keep anonymous because I am not looking for any special attention. If someone is going to reach out to me specifically about my experience, I would hope it would be to understand and fix the issues I encountered try to get support and not to placate me because I am being vocal about a bad experience.
Unfortunately every time I have contacted someone who responded to my vocal complaints, they didn't care about the issues I encountered and just wanted to shut me up. This goes for Best Buy, Comcast, UPS, and quite a few other big companies.
>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??
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.
You can use actual programming languages to beat up excel: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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/).
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.
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?).
> 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!
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.
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.
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...)
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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