How do I report a bug to MS?

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There’s a bug with Office 2007 and 2010 that has to do with embedding fonts. I’ll describe the bug below, but my question is simply this — How can I report this bug to MS? I know about the MS Forums, and have participated over there probably more than here. I know MS people monitor the posts in the Forums, but I’m not sure that’s the best way to report the bug. Anyone have any success reporting bugs to MS?

Here’s the bug…

I know how to embed fonts, and do so all the time. The problem comes when the fonts that need to be embedded are contained in an object — like an Equation Editor or MathType equation. I know Word (it also happens in PowerPoint) doesn’t sniff inside of objects to see what fonts are there, so my practice is to insert into the document header a space character from each font I’m using in the equations. Now one character from those fonts is in the text of the document, and Word will happily embed it. This process worked just fine for versions of Word up to Word 2007, but fails in both Word 2007 and Word 2010. I know Word’s embedding these fonts properly, because if I use the fonts in a sentence, and try to view them on a computer that doesn’t have the font installed, the text shows up as intended. However, if the font characters are inside an equation object (not talking about the OMML equation editor in Word 2007/2010; this is MS Equation 3.0 or MathType 4 and later, including the current version, 6.7), the characters are substituted when viewed on a computer without the fonts physically installed. So, although the fonts are being embedded properly, Word’s not using embedded fonts when rendering the equation objects. The fact that this procedure will still work in Word 2000, 2002, and 2003, but not in Word 2007 and 2010 is a pretty positive indication that the bug falls in MS’s lap to fix.

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In my brief testing of embedding fonts in Word 2007/2010 I am surprised you can get it to work at all, let alone get the problem only with embedded objects. Ignoring the lack of OpenType embedding, the results I get are not predictable enough on different versions of Office for me to rely on.

Doing some googling, it appears you are meant to report bugs in Office by calling Microsoft’s support number and the operator will create the bug report for you. You may even get to pay for this privilege and then Microsoft MAY decide to refund your money if they determine it is a bug.

Some MS products allow you to submit bugs online (http://connect.microsoft.com/) but not for Word.

Personally, I would use a less direct approach such as log feedback eg http://mymfe.microsoft.com/Office%202007/Feedback.aspx?formID=81

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I didn’t do extensive tests with Words 2007 & 2010, but all the tests I did run were successful on the document’s text. One thing that’s definitely critical to a more exhaustive test is trying other fonts & font types. I limited mine to Calibri and MT Extra.

Good suggestion on the Feedback link; I’ll try that. Thanks.

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Hi Bob

Is Design Science a Microsoft Partner? If so, you could use one of the free bug reports.

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Hi Bob

Is Design Science a Microsoft Partner? If so, you could use one of the free bug reports.

Hi Terry,

I could have mentioned this in the original post, but I figure the number of people who read a post is inversely proportional to its length, and I wanted people to read it. Actually we are a partner, and we considered this, but like most real decisions it’s a judgment call — if we use one on this, we may end up paying for one later that we need too. Or we may not. Six of one, 5 of the other. Or something like that.

Bob

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