The aim of a bug report is to enable us (the programmers) to see the program failing in front of us as it does in front of you. Therefore you should give careful and detailed instructions on how to make it fail. If we can make it fail, we will try to gather extra information until we know the cause. If we can't make it fail, we will have to ask you to gather that information for us.

Please avoid reports that say nothing, like "It doesn't work!", reports that make no sense to you, reports that don't give any information at all, reports that give speculative information. Be aware that a problem can come from your operating system, somebody else's program, or a network failure. Try to make very clear what are actual facts ("I was at the computer and this happened") and what are speculations ("I think the problem might be this"). Leave out speculations if you want to, but don't leave out facts. Describe what happened. Tell us exactly what you saw. Tell us why you think what you saw is wrong; better still, tell us exactly what you expected to see.

When you report a bug, you are doing so because you want the bug fixed. There is no point in swearing at the programmer or being deliberately unhelpful. It may be our fault and your problem. You might be right to be angry with us, but the bug will get fixed faster if you help us by supplying all the information we need.

Please give us some credit for basic intelligence. If the program really didn't work at all, we would probably have noticed. Since we haven't noticed, it must be working for us. Therefore, either you are doing something differently from us, or your environment is different from ours. We need information. Providing this information is the purpose of a bug report. More information is almost always better than less.

If you are not reporting a bug but just asking for help using the program, you should state where you have already looked for the answer to your question. ("I looked in the built-in Help menu, but couldn't find anything that told me if this is possible.") This will let us know where people will expect to find the answer, so they can make the documentation easier to use.