I don’t like to think of myself as someone who spends their time ranting about things that frustrate them. Generally if my ranting produces nothing valuable, I try to keep it to myself. All that being said….I’m blatantly defying those pragmatic philosophies with this post, so you’ve been forewarned.
The Microsoft Problem
I can’t be the only person in the world that constantly finds themselves interacting with Microsoft software, and realizing how close it is to being full featured and great…but always falling short in some key way/s? It happens so often, I know it’s gonna come up again, so let’s just call this the first installment of the “Microsoft Just Missed It” series.
Microsoft Forms
The first MS product subject to my tirade…Microsoft Forms. If you’re unfamiliar, MS Forms is one of the 14 million different products included with Office 365. It’s an easy to use form builder, for blasting out web forms to groups of people and collecting their form entries. A typical use case might be conducting intracompany surveys (though the forms can be used by anyone with the link if you don’t want to restrict it to your org). It’s super simple to build a form with drop-down choices, ratings, date entries, etc. Each form has a simple reporting back-end that out of the box, collects, summarizes, and reports on the form results, and even allows for the opportunity to export those results to CSV for further manipulation. All of those features are great.
In my case, I needed to replace a 3rd party app that field technicians were using to perform safety inspections. The 3rd party app had become a bit spammy as we were using the free version, and it was time to come up with a new solution. The inspection form itself was fairly straight forward. It included a number of Yes/No fields, some drop downs, and text input boxes, and when completed the field techs had to manually enter their operations manager’s email address who would be emailed a PDF version of the completed form.
I was sure I would have an easy win on my hands, as I could duplicate the functionality in MS Forms, and better yet, the operations managers would no longer have to manage the flood of PDF forms in their inbox (where we could only HOPE they organized and filed those PDFs appropriately). MS Forms would collect the results, organize them for us, and straighten up that process considerably….but
Where MS Forms Missed It
One very important aspect of the safety inspection is the inclusion of pictures of anything thought to be hazardous. The 3rd party app that was in use allowed the incorporation of photos as attachments..and as you can guess it, this was the single feature that MS Forms didn’t support. Not just photos, but no attachments whatsoever (at the time of this post) are supported by MS Forms. And I nearly pulled my hair out after realizing this. And I don’t have a lot of hair that I can stand to lose at the moment mind you.
In pure Microsoft fashion, they find a way to develop what could be a fantastic product with a ton of use cases…and somehow don’t have enough foresight to include a mind numbingly obvious feature that will be a complete deal breaker in some scenarios. And it gets better, the support of attachments became a formally suggested feature (with 6700+ votes) on Microsoft’s UserVoice forum at least as far back as 2017, and somehow it still isn’t available yet??
I do know at this point that the feature has been officially on the product road map for some time now, and even seen some forums that suggest folks in other countries are starting to see the feature available. Yet for me not so, and it drives me insane when a company with as many resources as Microsoft fails to thoroughly think through user needs when developing a product. Then, when it becomes painfully obvious that they’ve missed something crucial needed to make the product useful, they drag their feet on the implementation. If they didn’t have such a commanding share of the market for business products, this kind of apathy would certainly affect their bottom line, but they’re too big to feel it I guess.
