Any previous communities for MS help?

[Allan Fiddler]

Hello, newbie here! A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to use a community for asking/learning about Excel, Word, etc. I'm pretty sure it was "official" and not an obviously 3rd party site. I've just joined this one thinking I'd find all my old Q&A, but sadly this has not been the case! 
Can anyone recall if there were any other communities prior to this one? Has this one replaced older ones? 
Bit of an odd question, I know, but I'm trying to pick up my old Excel habits again, and I'd find it useful to be able to re-read all my old posts! 

[#2]

Hi Allan,

Lot of them. You may use this one, answers.microsoft.com which is more close to support; bit more technical https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/home or https://stackoverflow.com/. All of them are followed by Microsoft people. Perhaps something else what I forgot.

[#3]

Hi Sergei,

For correction, Stack Overflow isn't affiliated to Microsoft, it's affiliated to Stack Exchange Inc.

It's mainly used for computer programming questions and not specific in Microsoft products and services.

[#4]

Yes, that's true, but Microsoft people follow this resource, as well as many MVP:s are also here.

[#5]

Many thanks Sergei! Thought it might've been answers.microsoft.com but I didn't see anything of mine in there. I'm still using the same email address so any old posts would be recoverable if they were there!

If you come up wth any more I'd appreciate hearing back from you.

[#6]

Hi Allan,

If you'd like to find your old posts and remember your old nickname/email address why don't you google on it?

To narrow the search you may use something like

<nickname/address/whatever> site:answers.microsoft.com

in search string

[#7]

I have tried that Sergei. What I'm looking for does not show up...so they ain't there!

I'll just have to do without them...but thanks for your assistance with my question. 

[#8]

Sergei, found them in answers.microsoft.com! It transpires that I am in fact using a different email address to that which I used for my old posts in 2010! (I found them by  a search of a topic that I remembered posting, and I then found "me" and all my old posts!) 

One final question, what is the difference between techcommunity.microsoft.com and answers.microsoft.com? For users such as myself, would answers.microsoft.com be the better community to use? 

Allan

[#9]

Allan, great, Microsoft remembers everything.

Which community to use - that is the question. It discussed many times here, I may only make citation from this post https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/Am-I-in-the-right-place/m-p/47767/highlight/true#M...

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Technet is for IT pros, the people that install software

MSDN is for devs, the people that create software

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us is for people that need tech support, but can't/won't pay for it.

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However, for the applications as Excel that's very big intersection. Use one with which you are more comfortable, better all of them but focusing on one. 

[#10]

Thanks for the responses here so far, @Sergei Baklan!

@Allan Fiddler, the way I would sum up the difference in objectives between Answers and the Tech Community is as follows:

• Answers == this is for tech support and where people post questions about in-product behaviors that are potentially bugs
• Tech Community == the goal of this community is for higher-level discussion about products, so for Excel this could easily mean something more like "I can't quite get this conditional formatting to work" or "how are you using Power Query to automate things?"

Does this help?

[#11]

As  a comment - key words here are "difference in objectives".  In real life they are not so different.

[#12]

Valid point, but on the community management side of things, the team that actually builds the product will only be found here :)

Customer support agents are over at Answers, and engagement from us on the product team is pretty focused on the Office Insiders community.