How to provide feedback to microsoft?

As an end-user, this is a thoroughly frustrating thread.  This is what it sounds like to me:

Uh, hi, how do I provide feedback/ideas to Microsoft.

You just use one of the various mechanisms provided for input.

Well, some of them don't seem appropriate for just giving feedback/ideas when I don't want support.

Well, you just pick the right one for what it is you're doing and what it is you want to convey.

Yea, but with so many options, it still doesn't seem like there is one that just lets me give feedback/ideas and that I have to do a lot of looking around to find something and, even if I find one quickly, I'm not sure it's the right one.

Well, take a risk and try them.  Trust us that someone is monitoring them.

Having a potential plethora of ways to comment and/or get support doesn't necessarily equate with having a simple mechanism for giving product input that gives me, the end-user, the supposedly important person that Microsoft wants to empower, confidence that my input is going to the correct place.  Think of it from an end-user's perspective:  if you give me a hundred ways to provide input and some of them clearly don't end up where I want (such as wanting to provide input on Excel itself and not feedback on the web site for Excel), I'm going to tend to not be confident that I'm using the correct mechanism or that my feedback really is going where I want it.

The last few posts here by the people seeking to provide feedback are clear that they are trying to provide feedback (think new feature ideas, ideas on how current features could work better, frustrations with current features or the lack thereof that can help Microsoft develop better products).  They aren't trying to get support/answers.  The various Microsoft mechanisms tend to be geared toward providing support/answers or for getting feedback for something I just did in a program (such as using help in Excel) or looking up information on a web site, not toward getting random feedback/ideas on things the user isn't necessarily even currently doing (such as, oh, I was using Excel two weeks ago and I had this great idea on how to make charts simpler; I finally have time to send in my idea; oh, but wait, where do I write up my thoughts and whom do I send them to).

For Microsoft employees on this thread, if you want to see an example of a single portal that would be similar to what the end-users here have been suggesting, please talk with the Office sustaining engineering team.  I used to work for Microsoft and was the Lead for a team of engineers who created such a site for customer support.  That site was for getting real users' issues into our system so we could address them.  Something like that could easily be adapted for the purpose the end-users on this thread desire. If I remember correctly (since we built the site a few years ago and I retired from Microsoft earlier this year), one of the reasons we built that site was because input could come in from various sources in various ways and we needed one place to funnel that information through to enable the appropriate people to see all the issues coming in and to make decisions on whether or not we were going to address any particular issue.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that a Microsoft Feedback and Feature Request portal could be quite simple.  It doesn't seem like it would require much more than controls to drilldown to which product you want to comment on (perhaps, for example, a dropdown list of Office versions--such as Office 2013 and Office 2016--and a dropdown list of platforms--such as Windows, Mac, Android), controls to gather user information such as name and email address, and an edit box to provide the desired input.  The backend could route the input to the appropriate product team.  An end-user might then be able to search the site for input they've given in the past and see what, if anything, was done in response to their input. Of course, you might want to provide other product/feature drilldown capabilities; I'm just giving a simple example.

Such a site would not be for an end-user to get support/answers. It would just be for providing feedback/ideas.

My two cents...  I hope it helps clarify things.  :-)

Apple has a web page where you can provide feeback to Apple on their products, software, and services:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Is there a way to provide feedback to Microsoft on their products, software and services?

Why would we goto a Apple page -unless Microsoft is Ducking of course!

Just typical Microsoft RUN-AROUND!

I too had a lot of problems finding somewhere to post my thoughts/comments on an update issue.  I got around it by using a support request.  I don't know if it will be read or acted upon by anyone with the power to make changes but at least I tried.

https://support2.microsoft.com/contactus/emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1539

The great difficulty in finding some way to provide feedback, says to me that Microsoft doesn't really care what we think as they are pretty secure in their almost monopoly.  Given how rapidly the computing landscape changes, this is so shortsighted it would make me laugh if it wasn't so frustrating.

If perchance a Microsoft public relations guru happens to read this...ask yourself what being ignored in a retail outlet does to brand loyalty, willingness to recommend and future purchase decisions.

Ashley, or anyone at Microsoft who wants to field this; try this simple experiment:

In the Viso Viewer 2013, Clicking "?" (Help) returns a page not found error.

Go to any of Microsoft's contact sites and try to report this or even try to get help getting to the Visio Viewer help.

What you will experience is frustration, rage, disgust, etc.  If that is the intention of Microsoft's anti-feedback campaign, they are doing their job quite well.

Ashley, let me put this very simple!  In older versions of Excel, if you click HELP on the menu, you would find in the drop down dialog, an item that was labeled, "FEEDBACK".  And, if you clicked that item, a form would pop up that you filled out that offered strictly FEEDBACK to Microsoft.  When you were finished filling in the information you wished to offer to Microsoft, you clicked upon a button labeled, "SUBMIT".  Flash - Bam - Click and you are done!

So, I was just doing some extensive work in Excel 2003.  I needed a shortcut to enter some data quickly and do a quick calculation.  I could not find the shortcut, so I went to HELP and entered "keyboard shortcuts for Excel 2003" and would you care to guess what I got?  It was an extensive paper on Excel Keyboard Shortcuts - for Excel 2010!  Notice, it switched my subject of 2003 to 2010.  And do you know how much that helped me?  ZERO!  Further, I was creating several workbooks in which data is entered and then it is all summarized into yet another workbook.  It used to be that if one wanted to copy data form workbook A to workbook B, you just went to the cell you wanted the data copied into and you entered an equal sign, then you went to the other workbook, to the cell you wanted copied, and you put the cursor into that cell and hit "ENTER".  Pretty simple, right?

Do you know what you have to do today in order to do the very same thing?  First, you have to create a macro and then . . . . .   in other words, you must jump thru a whole bunch of hoops to do what you used to be able to do in just three steps!  Now, every time I want to do that, and then recall that I can no longer do it, I find myself very upset that some yahoo at Microsoft took a three step process and turned into a multi-muliti-step process.  That is NOT intelligent!  I wanted to tell Microsoft that fact!  So, I clicked on HELP and then I found a menu item entitled "CONTACT US".  That would lead one to believe that they could click on the link and have a method to send a message to Microsoft, so I clicked up on that link.  Care to take a WILD guess what happened next?  Don't look, that would be cheating as I asked if you would care to GUESS?  Well, to sum it up, I was taken to a SUPPORT page and it was entitled "CONTACT US" and in the next line, it said, "BUT FIRST LOOK HERE:  and there was a LONG, LONG, LONG LISTING of various sites that might have support information relative to what we needed help with except for one minor fact:  we did not want help with anything but rather wanted to inform MICROSOFT but once again after following the "CONTACT US" link, we were lead on another long, wild, goose chase looking through a whole ton of "STUFF" that we could care less about and the one thing we could not find, was a link where we could send info to Microsoft.  At that point, that incident was infuriating!  It is very, extremely difficult to send into to Microsoft because as we all her have tried to tell you and Microsoft, everyone but everyone, including each and every team at Microsoft, assume people only want to send QUESTIONS to Microsoft and the truth is that assumption is simply completely 100% false as often we wish to send INFORMATION TO Microsoft!

Your job, as we see it here as users or as most recognized, 'CUSTOMERS" often wish to inform Microsoft and therefore not matter what is believed that is false at Microsoft, there should be on each and every single page at Microsoft support, a link that would allow us to click and immediately be able to send INFORMATION to Microsoft.  At one point, with the old system, I sent my comments to Microsoft.  And in those days you had to identify yourself via your email address although you were told it was not the place for support questions and support questions would NOT be answered.  My idea was so good that Microsoft took the time to contact me via my email address and told me they loved the idea and in future versions, my idea would be incorporated from that point forward.  I don't remember what it was, but the point is, we have ideas, information and criticism that we should be able to easily, as in EASILY submit to the company that just might be very helpful to the company.  

However, as it is now, we have to leave our work, go online, search and search and search unless we tattoo some where on our body the location of that one single place at Microsoft that through some miracle, we can go to and send a quick message to Microsoft and then go back to our work, or in other words, it was 1, 2, 3, or maybe 4 steps, and we were done.  Today, I am so far removed from what I was doing in order to now try to send something to Microsoft, I don't even remember what I was doing and so what we are trying to tell you is MICROSOFT NEEDS TO MAKIE IT EASY FOR US TO SEND INFORMATION TO THEM, PERIOD, end of discussion and we don'[t need some really nice young lady to tell us we are wrong that there is some far fetched easy to find easy way to do what we want to do, simply because that is absolutely not true, period.  Good-bye!