Without notice, the main forum for Office customers to tell Microsoft what they want has disappeared. No explanation of what’s happened and what, if anything, will replace it.
For many years, Microsoft has boasted about their UserVoice pages such as https://office365.uservoice.com/ but it’s gone dark. All the years of suggestions and discussions have been deleted, replaced with a tiny text line “This site is not currently active”.
What’s going on?
Microsoft isn’t saying, officially. It’s likely UserVoice will be replaced with some other ‘in-house’ replacement run entirely within Microsoft.
UserVoice is a separate company which Microsoft pays to run their feedback forums.
It’s likely Microsoft has decided to save money by running a similar service on their own servers.
Still, it’s a pretty clumsy way of doing it. An overlap period or links from the old service to the new one would have been better.
Perhaps a sign of how little Microsoft really cares about customer feedback, if they can’t be bothered to arrange a smooth transition.
UserVoice was never the great customer feedback forum that Microsoft touts it.
“A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” – Paul Simon
Microsoft is quick to hype the few, fulfilled UserVoice requests, but most of them were trivial like Dark Mode.
More substantive customer requests are just ignored. Modal dialogs remain to annoy users. Grammar and style setting still apply globally in Word with no simple way to apply per document. Many long-suffering Office users have their own lists …
UserVoice was great for Microsoft as a ‘dumping ground’ for troublesome customers. Complaining users were pointed to UserVoice as a place to make their request with no guarantee that Microsoft would do anything.
In the meantime …
While Microsoft rearranges their customer feedback there are some ways to talk to Microsoft.
Look for the smiley face at top right of some desktop app or the Feedback button on the Help tab in Office desktop and web apps.
Office Mobile apps have feedback options in Settings | Help and Feedback.
