Guidelines for the PowerPoint Support Forums
Most online support forums have a few simple guidelines. Following them will help keep the forums user-friendly, and will help you get the answers you need quickly and accurately.
First, remember that most forums are for user-to-user support. Most of the members, even if they have icons or badges indicating some special status, are volunteers, not paid support staff.
PowerPoint MVP Sonia Coleman summed it up best long ago, and it's still good advice:
"The help you receive on the internet is not really free, though it is willingly and happily provided at a very low and reasonable cost. The price of admission is respect and professionalism and is due and must be paid in full with each post and reply. That's what makes it such a great place for learning and for sharing what we have learned."
How User to User support forums work
Support forums are the internet version of the old "infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters" trick:
Tell your problem to enough people and one of them is almost sure to have a solution.
Forums put your message in front of thousands of people. All you have to do is type it once.
Actually it's even better: When somebody answers your question, somebody else will reply with other ideas, more details or yes, corrections. Anyone with an interest in your problem can join in. That's why it works as well as it does.
And it gets better yet: Using Google or the forum's search feature, you can search for answers that someone already wrote instead of posting your question and waiting for a reply. Instant Gratification!
How to get help
First, do your research. People on these forums are generally friendly/polite, but they're liable to get testy if you ask a question that's been answered 12 times in the last month or that a simple web search would have answered in a few seconds.
- Search the PowerPoint FAQ (this site)
- Use the forum's search feature.
- Type your question directly into Google, Bing or another web search engine.
If that doesn't help, post your message on the forum. Be sure to include all the information needed to solve your problem. Please describe your problem as completely as you can. Include:
- The operating system version (ie, Windows 7, 8, 10, 11; Mac OS X, etc.), and if Windows, whether it's 32- or 64-bit.
- Is your operating system up to date?
- Network type and version, if any.
- The version of Office/PowerPoint you're using and when you last updated it.
- Are you using a desktop, web, iPhone, Android or other version?
- A detailed description of what you were doing (or trying to do) when the problem arose.
- What did you expect to happen? What actually DID happen?
- The exact, full text of any messages that appeared
- Details about any printer or other special hardware involved, if any.
- Be prepared to upload an example of your problem file to DropBox, OneDrive or the like and share the link on the forum so interested people can have a look at it.
Now you know what to do. Before you go off to do it, there are a few things you shouldn't do.
How to avoid annoying the people who can help you
- Post your message just once. If you have a problem or comment, post it, then visit the forum again periodically to see if anyone's responded. Asking the same question over and over won't get you faster service. It will annoy the neighbors.
- Please DON'T drop questions and disappear; someone might need to request more information from you, or may have spent a good bit of time researching and typing up an answer. Yep, these people are weird that way. But ghost them and you've lost a friend.
- Don't bash the staff or volunteers. There's no point. Neither the MVPs nor the moderators have anything to do with Microsoft's policy and product decisions. Yelling at them won't solve your problem, but it'll make them less inclined to donate their free time to help you solve it. It'll probably get you and your question ignored.
- Don't ask for email replies. A private email conversation deprives you and others of the give and take that often produces a solution to your problem. Most forum members ignore requests for email responses. It's simply considered bad form.
- Don't Spam. Littering the forum with commercial messages will annoy the very people you're hoping to sell to and may get you banned. BUT: If you know of a product that might help another user solve their problem, please say so. Just keep it low-key, explain where to find it, what it costs, why it would help the user and above all, whether you have any commercial interest in the product or not.
- Above all, be polite and professional. Flames, personal attacks and rudeness are out. We're blessed with a great group of pleasant, helpful and knowledgeable people on the PowerPoint forums, both guests and the regulars. Let's keep it that way. If you disagree with something, by all means say so. Politely. Respectfully. We all learn from different ideas and points of view and yes, even our mistakes. But let's discuss ideas, not attack the people who express them.
End of Sermon. Thanks for bearing with it.