Crabby Office Lady

We implore you to give us feedback about the various types of content on the Office Online Web site. But, not all feedback is created equal. This week, I offer advice on how to send us comments that will hit their mark and make an impact.

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You've already been introduced to the new and fabulous Office Online site. Some of you have offered insightful comments...and some of you have shaken your digital fists at me.

See, I often get feedback from my readers making suggestions about how to make a certain program or feature better. I also get comments about how the site search engine isn't doing the bidding of customers. And while I appreciate the time you take in writing your well-crafted (and oft crabby) messages, your efforts are, unfortunately, somewhat misguided.

This week's column is part refresher, part writing lesson. First, I'll point you toward the various places you can give us feedback — whether it's about the site itself, a specific Web page, or an article or column — and then I'll give you some advice about how to offer feedback, give suggestions, and supply comments that will really get you somewhere. (Truthfully, comments like "You are all greedy pigs with no talent" don't really inspire us to do better and make your life easier.)

Send it on over to us

In the left navigation area on just about any page on the site, there is a link that says Send us your comments. Click it, and you'll be whisked off to a feedback page that gives you plenty of room to offer your intelligent insight and witty remarks about that particular page you were on. (You can also use the drop-down box to comment on any other area of the site, too.)

Maybe you think it's hard to navigate, maybe you think the content is stale, or perhaps it changes too often. Whatever you think, send it our way; you'll feel better and if enough of you make a similar request, you may just find your idea implemented in living color on the site.

An example of a useful comment about a particular Web page:

"I really like the way the new site is structured, but I'm having a hard time finding specific help for my program on the Help and How-to page."

 Note   You can trust me when I say that we take your feedback very seriously (if sometimes a bit too personally). We can't get better at what we do until we know what is or is not working for you.

Suggest new Office Online content

Here is where you can make a suggestion about anything on this Web site, be it a new template, a piece of clip art, or anything else. (Note that this is a place to give suggestions regarding our Web site content, not for the programs themselves; I'll get to that in a minute.)

• Suggest a Template
• Suggest an Image
• Suggest a Course
• You can also make a suggestion about anything else on the site, ranging from the Office Marketplace to the Calendar Sharing Service.

An example of a useful way to suggest new Web site content:

"A training course about how to really customize templates would really save me years of therapy."

OK...NOW make a feature suggestion

You dislike many things about certain features of certain products. For example, I have received numerous e-mails, entreating me to:

• Get rid of the Drawing Canvas in Word. (Although this feature was on by default in Word 2003, we listened to what you had to say and now we changed that behavior for Word 2007. See? Your talking works.)
• Make the Works menu available in Excel.
• Offer the ability to color Outlook folders.

Note that I said, "entreating ME." Let me say, once and for all, that I do not have a direct line to the very large group of people who design the Office programs; no, I just deal with the programs after they're shipped out, same as you. So, if you want something to change for the next version of Office, you can tell me about it until you're blue in the face and I'll still be standing there with a greasy smile pasted on my face, or you can do something constructive:

Suggest changes to Office products.

An example of a useful way to make a feature suggestion:

"Hello, I really love the way I can implement the Works menu in Word. Please add that functionality to the other Office programs, such as Excel and PowerPoint."

Community participants vote for suggestions, and Microsoft uses the votes to help prioritize features in upcoming versions. Each month, Microsoft will respond to the suggestions with the most votes.

When you're having a problem on the Web site

Let's say you can't get a Web page on the Office Online site to load. Who ya gonna call? (Not Ghostbusters, I can tell you that.) Well, you're not going to call anyone, frankly, unless the problem is with your Internet connection, in which case you won't be able to report a problem to us anyway.

But I digress.

If you are on our site and you think that a problem you are having has to do with the technical aspects of our site, please report it. It really helps us identify and fix the problem a lot more quickly. And if the problem you are reporting is regarding a specific page, please include the URL of that page.

• Report a problem on this Web site

An example of a useful way to report a problem:

"The charming and comforting face of the Crabby Office Lady seems to be missing from her column located here <give URL>. Please send her back; we miss her."

Get answers from other Office customers

This next link takes you to our Office Discussion Groups site where you can ask a question of other Community members. This is a great way to step into the wonderful world of online collaboration and communication. You never need to feel alone with your problems or keep a cool tip all to yourself. As one of my editors likes to say, "Share the love." (What he really means is "Come clean; what office gossip do ya have for me?")

How it works: You enter your question in a box to search whether it has been asked in the community. If your question has already been asked and received an answer, you can see if the answer actually answers your question. If it doesn't, you can pose the question (in a polite, constructive manner, please).

 Note   If you decide to post a new question, you will have to sign in using your Windows Live™ ID.

• Office Discussion Groups

An example of a useful way to ask a question of other Office customers:

"Is it possible to have multiple time zones in one Outlook profile?"

Giving feedback about specific content on the site

Now, this is where I can really tell how you're feeling about me and my columns, in particular. At the bottom of every assistance article or column, there is a place where you can let us know whether the information you just read was helpful (or not):

If you choose "Yes," you'll get the opportunity to tell us "how?" If you say "No," you can give us a clue as to how we could have made it more helpful. And if you choose "I don't know," we'll ask you what you were trying to do. This information is vital; we use it to make the content more useful and helpful for you.

You can rate templates by giving them from one to five stars, and you can offer comments, too. This next link explains the two places where you can rate a template and how to offer your feedback about it: Rate a template.

My wants, my needs!

We read your comments, and we take them very seriously. Every column, article, template, and training course is represented in a database mapping to your feedback, and if a writer provided a piece of content for the site that is getting consistently lousy ratings and irritable comments from customers, it's part of the writer's job to make the necessary changes to make the content more useful for you, our customer. That isn't me marketing something to you; that is the truth.

So, if you get nothing else out of this column, please put this in your noggin: As writers and creators of the stuff on this site, our job security depends on our ability to make you happy. It's that simple, really. You may think of Microsoft as this huge, impersonal software company, but we are made up of real people; people who have some of the same issues you do in your daily doings at work or at home. In the best of all possible worlds, we assistance writers would be out of a job because the Office programs would be completely transparent and obvious — there would be no need for us to explain anything. But some things can get complicated and our customers run the gamut from beginner to expert. And so...we have jobs. Our job is to explain, to illuminate, and to advise. And your job is to let us know how we're doing and how to make your life easier. So please, provide your feedback and do it in a way that is useful. We can't do it without you.

Now, as for yours truly, I get many of my column ideas from you, my customers. Of course, I love the "You made my day, Crabby Office Lady" comments and I even love the comments that set me straight on a pun I misused or a quotation I misquoted, but what I really get a kick out of are the thoughtful, useful, even painful pieces of information you give to me when you answer that "Was this information helpful" question at the bottom of my columns.

A final note: All of the links I've provided today are located on the Contact Us page.

Tip of the Week

The Tip of the Week for the October 4, 2005 column, mentioned how you can see the sum of a bunch of items in Excel without using the =SUM function. I heard from no fewer than four readers who let me know that I was an ignorant slug when it came to this hidden gem because there was a whole lot more to this tip than I realized.

S.L. of Pennsylvania, J.A. from the Netherlands, C.M. from England, and V.M. from South Dakota wrote to tell me that the sum of the selected items in the lower right corner is not the only function you can access. When you right-click that number, you can also access several other functions for that selected group of cells, such as Average, Count, Count Nums, Max, and Min. Well, smack my face. I had no idea. And as for my ignorance about this feature, I hope you will still always cherish the initial misconceptions you had about me (as in "infallible" and "expert in every way").

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." — George Bernard Shaw

About the author

Annik Stahl, the Crabby Office Lady columnist, takes all of your complaints, compliments, and knee-jerk reactions to heart. Therefore, she graciously asks that you let her know whether this column was useful to you — or not — by entering your feedback using the Was this information helpful? tool below. And remember: If you don't vote, you can't complain.

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