A couple common questions I see often enough in the forums I participate in are: “How can I contact Microsoft?” and “How can we report this to Microsoft?“. So, today, I thought I’d cover these two questions.

How can I contact Microsoft?

Now, it used to be very easy to get in touch with Microsoft and you could get their Telephone number through the Contact link on their site(s), but now you get redirected to an AI bot that has you spinning in circles to get you nowhere (talking from personal experience! 🙁 ). So I thought I’d share the link to all their global phone numbers: Global Customer Service phone numbers. Now it is important to note that if you decide to contact MS to report an issue they will require your credit card number and will charge you (I believe 500$) that gets reimbursed only if they deem it a genuine bug on their behalf, otherwise you are paying for their support!

You’ll also notice that they provide numbers for business users and not home users!
For home users you are expect to login, and then basically give you a Google Search mechanism with no real way to actually speak to someone!

This is exactly why I laugh at people that pressure people into upgrading while talking about “end of support”, what support!? Microsoft makes it frustrating, if not impossible, to actually get real human support.

How can we report this to Microsoft?

Previously, the privileged answer was to post your suggestion/issue on uservoice.com, but MS has, or is in the process, of abandoning this feedback medium.

So as it stands now you only have one true means to get information to each Development Team and that is to use the Feedback button contained within each application (Settings -> Help & Feedback -> Contact Support). Be sure to include your e-mail address so they can follow-up should they choose to. Be sure to always include repo steps so they can reproduce the issue at their end, as well as including the build no. of your Access installation. Not that there is any more information on the subject, but here is Microsoft’s page on the subject: How do you report an issue or bug?.

Another option is to post on a Microsoft forums such as Microsoft Answers Forum – Access in the hopes that either a Microsoft employee actually comes across it (unlikely) or that an MVP will spot it and report it back to the Development Team (much more likely).