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'm going to update my post with more information because actually, there's a lot of great tips from these comments!

Just in case anyone is curious about the product version. It is often under File->Account (->About).

e.g. http://i.imgur.com/nIo4d2l.png

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.

Works for most large companies, not just Microsoft.

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.

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?

Excel 2016 does have a feedback menu with Smiles and Frowns.

File -> Feedback

Disclaimer: MSFT Employee (not in office)

It's a dystopic novel focused on an employee at a tech company modeled after Google/Facebook... except taking their data ventures even farther. :)

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.

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.

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.

I guess we still have a long way to go before we make software right.

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 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.

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.

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.