Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish - and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

On Call The Register knows that tech support is a vocation that induces frustration, which is why each Friday we offer a new edition of On Call - the reader-contributed column that details real-life support stories so you can at least enjoy misery in company.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Brad" who told us about his first tech support job, for a grocery retailer based in a major US city.

Brad spent most of his time at the company's biggest store, but a few times a week was despatched to other outposts.

"My boss gave me a lot of leeway so long as I kept the PCs running," Brad told On Call - perhaps because that worthy had a degree in Psychology, not tech.

Brad was therefore not able to turn to his boss for help on the finer points of things like testing software before major deployments.

Yet Brad was asked to do the latter: the story he sent On Call dates back to 1996 when he was asked to move the retailer from Microsoft Office 95/7.0 which was proving unstable when running large spreadsheets.

See? Excel hell is eternal! But we digress ...

A move to Office 97/8.0 was on the agenda, and one day a package containing eight floppy disks arrived.

Brad got to work using those floppies to install Microsoft's latest suite and test it as thoroughly as he could. A few weeks later, the Mac version of the suite arrived, and he tested that too.

Satisfied that both versions worked, he procured appropriate licenses, arranged things so users would not be at their desks on a Friday afternoon, and started the upgrade.

For the next 48 hours, Brad wore out the carpet carrying those floppies as he installed Office on over a hundred PCs in different offices.

On Monday morning, he arrived at work and prepared to bask in praise for a job well done.

And that's when the complaints about corrupted Excel files started to arrive.

Brad frantically conducted more tests and found the cause: a spreadsheet created on a PC could be read on a Mac, but once the Mac opened it, Windows users would see only gobbledygook.

"I could see my job flashing before my eyes if I didn't find a solution quickly," Brad told On Call.

His first action was an all-hands email advising colleagues to avoid shifting spreadsheets between OSes. But he couldn't find an actual fix, other than returning to Office 7.

So frustrating was that prospect that Brad sent "a quite angry email" to [email protected] - assuming that was the best way to contact Microsoft founder Bill Gates. "I expressed how upset I was at this obvious bug and essentially accused Bill of beta testing his software on the public," Brad told On Call.

When Brad arrived at work the next morning, on the stroke of 09:00 his phone rang. He answered, and was greeted by a Microsoft developer who wanted to help.

The Microsoftie spent an hour conversing with Brad to learn how the problem manifested, his attempts at remediation, and anything else that might help.

"To this day I have never met a person so desperate to understand and help with a problem," Brad told On Call.

The Microsoft techie signed off with a pledge to offer a solution - soon.

Brad showed up again the next day and found a package on his desk: disks containing Microsoft Office 8.01 along with a letter "assuring me they had been able to isolate the issue and that this version would resolve the problem once it was installed on the Macs."

Macs were in the minority at the retailer where Brad worked, so he had the upgrade sorted by lunchtime. Over the next week he got around to installing the update on the company's Windows boxes, too.

"In the end, I was sure I'd probably hit the email address I'd been hoping for on the head and Bill Gates had likely made clear his frustration as well," Brad mused.

Thankful for the rapid help, Brad decided to send a thank you note to the same address.

He now regrets that mail.

"I realized that instead of just sending the thank you, I should have followed it up with a question: 'Do you need anyone in your QA department?'"

And in his message to On Call, he suggested others might like to make the same offer in their correspondence with CrowdStrike.

Has an industry luminary helped you to support their faulty products? Go on, spill your celebrity goss by clicking here to send On Call an email. ®