
How to Report a Bug to Microsoft - Sujan
http://www.schveiguy.com/blog/2017/05/how-to-report-a-bug-to-microsoft/
======
Namrog84
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

~~~
schveiguy
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...

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

~~~
flai
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.

------
alkonaut
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
How do you propose filtering tech support from bug reports at scale?

~~~
SolarNet
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_
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.

------
mherdeg
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_...](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_excel) , 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.

~~~
mistermann
> 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
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
Don't forget how sorry they are to hear it and that they will most happy to
assist with your problem.

------
rootsudo
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.

------
foobarbazetc
Still waiting for Microsoft to fix this huge bug in Edge for over a year:

[https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/platfor...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/platform/issues/7134034/)

I wouldn't hold my breath. Microsoft is koolaid city.

~~~
alphast0rm
Wow--props for your persistence. I thought the original blog post was bad.

Hopefully this gets more visibility so it's escalated correctly.

------
cptskippy
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
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...

~~~
cptskippy
I was half hoping they'd offer to send me one. I've wanted to play with a
Kinect and SLAM but the upfront cost is too high for me.

------
jbob2000
>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??

~~~
schveiguy
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.

~~~
zie
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.

~~~
kaleidic
Or indeed
[https://github.com/kaleidicassociates/excel-d](https://github.com/kaleidicassociates/excel-d)
which schweiguy may find more appealing :)

------
mpw222
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.

------
DamonHD
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
Is this story available in more detail somewhere?

~~~
DamonHD
Only generally after a few pints... B^>

------
oblosys
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.

~~~
a_humean
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
So probably the right way to get a bug in Excel fixed is to report it to the
typescript team...

------
Spooky23
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
Inbox zero meets bug tracking

------
sonyakop
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
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.

------
dandare
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_...](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)

> 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!

------
agrona
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.

~~~
nercury
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.

------
duncan_bayne
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.

------
mattnewport
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.

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

~~~
johansch
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
> 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.

------
laktak
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
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
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.

------
bubblethink
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
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.

------
505
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.

------
partycoder
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-c...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-
customer-service/)

~~~
chmanie
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.

------
doggydogs94
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.

------
known
Its due to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence)

------
redm
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.

------
jpswade
What about this?
[https://office365.uservoice.com/](https://office365.uservoice.com/)

~~~
13of40
Even better: [https://excel.uservoice.com/](https://excel.uservoice.com/)

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

------
megamindbrian
I feel like the entire world is ignoring me.

------
kyberias
Ok, so this was just a silly rant.

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

------
partycoder
"DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run".

\- Microsoft

The reason you are all using MS Excel today.

~~~
bboreham
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
What are your thoughts on Quattro Pro?

~~~
bboreham
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.

