Hi schveiguy,<p>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 :)<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/N6X2Lj4.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/N6X2Lj4.png</a><p>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 <a href="https://excel.uservoice.com/" rel="nofollow">https://excel.uservoice.com/</a>. 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.<p>edit: +1 to <a href="https://answers.microsoft.com" rel="nofollow">https://answers.microsoft.com</a> as mentioned by mherdeg
First, I think it's good that Microsoft and others separate <i>tech support</i> from <i>bug reporting</i>. Obviously some support requests will be due to bugs - but I'd never <i>ever</i> try to enter a bug via tech support (and this article shows why).<p>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 <i>support</i> - I'm not buying a service from Microsoft I'm <i>providing</i> a service. For free.<p>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%?)<p>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.
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.<p>Also sounds like one or more of those people advised him to report his issue in the web support forums at <a href="https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_excel" rel="nofollow">https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...</a> , 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).<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>For example, a typical agent would have 100-120 cases a month. CSAT can not fall under 92%. Yes, 92%.<p>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.<p>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.
Still waiting for Microsoft to fix this huge bug in Edge for over a year:<p><a href="https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/7134034/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...</a><p>I wouldn't hold my breath. Microsoft is koolaid city.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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!<p>I still haven't gotten a response from Microsoft Support about who I should contact at Apple about my issue though...<p>* 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.
>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.<p>Ok, sounds janky, but go on...<p>>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.<p>Oh god why?? Why!?? What is this Frankenstein system you have created??
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):<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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...<p>(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.
I get the same nonsense and runaround as a Premier customer.<p>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.<p>Now, forget it. It seems like the KPI they care about isn't resolution, but getting issues dumped to the next queue.
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 (<a href="https://excel.uservoice.com/" rel="nofollow">https://excel.uservoice.com/</a>).<p>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.<p>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?).<p><a href="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" rel="nofollow">https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...</a><p>> 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!
It bears repeating: this is how Microsoft saw the open source movement back in the day:<p><a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/" rel="nofollow">http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/</a><p>I don't think they've changed their fundamental attitude to their customers in the following years.
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?<p>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.
For an example on how it should work look at Bash On Windows. They are really doing a great job there.<p><a href="https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues</a>
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.
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.<p>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.
In contrast, Steve Jobs was known for randomly answering customer support calls to better understand the customer.<p><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-customer-service/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-c...</a>
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.
Its due to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence</a>
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.