The send a smile feedback tool makes a welcome return with the publication of the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview. It was used successfully on Office 2007 betas and enabled more than 40,000 items of feedback to be channeled to Microsoft. This feedback is processed manually, so rest assured that when you submit your feedback somebody is actually listening. If you discover a feature in Office 2010 that you think deserves a big thumbs up, you can click the smile icon and tell Microsoft about it. Similarly, if you find something that irks you, use the frown icon. The send a smile tool can be used to give feedback about features in Office 2010, but it can also be used to suggest features that you would like to see there.

The feedback tool installs automatically when you install the Technical Preview of Office, so you don’t need to worry about installing extra programs.

According to the Microsoft blog:

Send-a-Smile automatically installs with Office 2010, you’ll see two icons added to the notifications area of the taskbar over by the clock: a Smile to click when you want to give us positive feedback and a Frown to click when there’s something you don’t like. On Win7, you may need to go specifically add them to the list of icons you want to see in the taskbar.

Submitting Office 2010 Feedback To Microsoft

Submitting feedback about Office 2010 is simple. Consider the unlikely event that you have something good to say about the product. On clicking the smile icon, the Welcome to Send a Smile dialogue box is presented.

As you can see, the email address you can enter is optional. Unscrupulous users who downloaded Microsoft Office 2010 torrents, might get a bit twitchy at this dialogue box. Don’t worry, just leave it blank and click OK.

The next window is interesting. Let’s avoid convention and start at the bottom and work our way up. At the bottom there is a checkbox that enables you to send a screenshot of the last window you had displayed. Make sure you didn’t have something weird on your screen when you click the feedback icon, otherwise a screenshot will be taken of that. Better to be in an Office 2010 application when you click that button.

If you don’t want to send a screenshot, uncheck the screenshot box. Also at the bottom is another checkbox that allows you to send your contact details (the email address you supplied on the previous dialogue box).

Use the text box at the top to add any feedback you think Microsoft will find useful. When ready, click Submit and the feedback is sent.

The comment gets added to a database at Microsoft, where it is subsequently filtered to the relevant team. A website internal to Microsoft, and driven by this database, is available to team members. Microsoft use the feedback in the database to fix bugs and introduce enhancements to Office 2010. The website helps the team prioritise issues and requests. This is what that website looks like: