this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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People say "RTFM" then you get to the manual and it's this
Microsoft Manuals...
That is spot on. Usually you would expect the manual to be hit and miss when it comes to troubleshooting but Microsoft is consistently miss, skipping the important parts and details.
Microsofts documentation is also increasingly just outright wrong:
if you spend enough time looking up things about their newer products like M365, defender, or azure, especially when it comes to scripting related to those, there's a ton of simply outdated info on the official docs that makes it really difficult to figure out why your setup isn't doing what it's supposed to.
from changed variable names, to missing functions, to unexplained buttons, etc., etc.
the newer docs are straight up trash!
you're better off searching around for forum posts or whatever, than using the official docs...
There used to be a spot on joke about Microsoft documentation taking the piss out of the fact that it was always 100% accurate but at the same time pretty useless. That joke hasn’t been relevant for a while.
It’s so frustrating trying to find out how to do something in one of the admin centres for M365 and you find a Microsoft document with exactly what you need in it only to find out that the UI has changed and the steps don’t work now. Did they move it? Did they remove it? Who knows?
our admins are regularly straight up fighting against this bs!
"where the fuck has this fucked off to now?? it was right here last month?!"
so glad I'm not doing MS administration...
If you are used to documentation like MS's, then AI responses probably look more reasonable and useful. If AI results look better than your own docs you should feel really bad.
this is the part that's really frustrating:
i sometimes feel forced to use chatGPT (duck.ai) to simply search for Microsoft things, because search engines only return SEO garbage with the exact same content spammed across like a million "tech tips for beginners" sites...and the docs, as established, are pretty useless...
keep in mind: i fucking hats "AI".
making me use it makes me not have anything to do with whatever you're selling.
it's getting progressively more impossible to simply use MS products, because the information you need to use them is so hidden away!
combine those two things and ta-da: that's why all my stuff at home is running linux now.
Amazon is no better. Go look up the correct parameter format required to set a compliance lock on an object in S3 via the API. Now try it yourself. Surprise!
Yep, that's why I started the Lemmy .NET MAUI Community - try and reassemble the collective experts who got scattered when Microsoft shutdown the old Xamarin forum - they had been invaluable when I was trying to learn Xamarin from the Microsoft resources.
oh hey, that's great! thank you!
Also, requiring login.
Basically Hello World using the win32 API. I believe I first encountered this before college, and it took actually professional dev experience to really understand it.
Link 1: Pencil selection guide Link 2: Ovals vs. circles Link 3: Wings Link 4: Bird feet
Another problem is that people skim to the "most important bits" without knowing they're skipping something important. Then some of those people complain how the manual is shit.
I guess it could be shit if it is way too verbose though.
Exactly what I was thinking. Like needing to understand a huge preamble just to do the Very Simple Thing. I just want to move on, not marry this Linux command.