OneNote Testing

Now that the beta is out the door, I can talk about OneNote 2010!

Finally - the beta is public, so run over there and try it out! The toughest part about this blog has been trying to write about what I'm testing, but not being able to mention the new features we are adding.

So let's go way back in time and talk about a change I tested related to printing. One of the pieces of feedback we got was that folks that use rule lines on pages wanted the lines to print when they print to paper. OneNote 2010 will do this for you automatically - if you have ruled lines on a page, they will print.

Testing this was pretty simple and straightforward. Apply each rule line setting and print to both color and black and white printers. We have many of these in our lab, and some of the folks on the OneNote team also have some of the printers that include scanners built into them. While setting up was simple (create dozens of pages of different sizes, apply the different rule lines, change the rule line colors and page content), printing took quite a while. Installing the printers took time to start. Once I started the printing, I had some "free time" to move on to other tasks while the printouts were made. Then round them up and visually inspect each page.

This is where I hit a little surprise to me. If I saw a bug, I would report it in our database. Usually, I'm able to add all the needed information to the bug: items like screen shots, memory dumps, log files and so on. Since I had a piece of paper that was showing the bug, there was no way to add this to the database. I quickly realized the easiest way to show the behavior was to write the bug number on the printout and drop it off on the developer's desk.

Now you should see your rule lines when you print. Here's some photographic proof:

And just for fun, this is one of the rows of printers in one of our labs I used, taken with a really bad cell phone camera:

Ok, this is a very simple change we made for OneNote 2010. It was based on feedback we got from our customers, though, so I hope everyone likes the change. Like I mentioned, this was relatively simple to test. I wanted to start off talking about testing OneNote 2010 gently and move on to the more complicated tasks the test team had faced.

For now, get the beta and enjoy!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Why in the world are our notebooks wrapped in plastic?

This is new. One of the nice things about Microsoft is our office supply rooms. We can go in any time and grab a pen, pencil or binder clips or whatever we need to get our jobs done. One of the items we have available are small  spiral bound notebooks - about 8 in. x10 in. or so. We've had them for years and I have a pile of them with old notes and status for too many versions of Outlook to count.

When I first came to OneNote, I realized I don't need to use these notebooks any more and moved everything to OneNote. We even managed to get some flyers printed for free to distribute with the notebooks around campus to let everyone know that OneNote can replace the need for physical notebooks. I've been looking for a copy of that little insert for awhile - I lost mine.

Anyway, this started happening recently:

Yes, the notebooks are now wrapped in cellophane. For the life of me, I cannot understand why…

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Opening a new SideNote in OneNote when Windows starts

I saw this question on the newsgroup the other day and left a short description of how to get the behavior the user wanted. Basically, the request was to have a sidenote open each time Windows was started so that OneNote was ready to take notes at once. There is a way to do this and here is how.

First I checked the command line switch documentation for OneNote. According to it, if you add a /sidenote command to the command line, then when OneNote starts you will get a sidenote. This is the same behavior you get if you press WINDOWS+N, by the way.

The method to get this to start when Windows does is to add a shortcut using that command line switch to the startup group. Here's how to do this in Windows XP (Vista and Win7 are very similar).

Open the start menu then hover over the startup group and right click. You should get a menu like this:

Select Open. You will get a normal folder view of the shortcut folder.

Right click anywhere in it and select New | Shortcut:

You'll get the Create Shortcut Dialog. Browse to wherever you installed OneNote. This is probably c:\program files\Microsoft Office\Office 12 and select the OneNote.exe file there. Be sure to not select "onenotem.exe":

Click OK.

The last thing to do is to add that command /sidenote after the closing quote for the shortcut to OneNote. It should look like this (there is a space in there too):

Click Next and you can name the shortcut anything you want.

Then finish. You should see your shortcut in the startup folder. Double click it to test it and you are done!

Now each time your computer starts, a side note will open. If you ever want to get rid of this behavior, just delete the shortcut you made.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

A great and detailed OneNote planning template

This is a pretty detailed time planner I stumbled across last week. Dean Gardiner created a very detailed planner and packaged it as a OneNote package file and made it free for everyone. How detailed? He includes a short video for how to set it up. I really recommend those interested in using OneNote as a planner check this out. Mr. Gardiner has constructed this to be used from either a top down or bottom up approach. I'll leave the rest of the details to him, and there are quite a few.

The only difficulty I had was downloading the template. The link is on the left side, but for some reason the first time I tried to download it a zero byte file resulted. I tried again and it worked, and now Dean has a bit of text that reminds everyone to right click and select "Save As" to get the ZIP file.

I couldn’t resist: I used this as a quick test for OneNote 2010 as well. This is an example of a “real world notebook” and I wanted to ensure OneNote 2010 had no problems at all with it.  I doubled clicked the OneNote package file that resulted and chose a location to create the notebook:

And then I thought I hit a bug. None of the section groups that are in the final notebook showed any content. I checked every section group using the UI and they were all blank. I couldn't think of any reason this would happen but entered a bug anyway. A developer immediately assigned it back to me to ask the obvious question - had any of the section groups had sections created on the disk drive? His question was fairly important to narrow down what was happening. If OneNote was failing to extract the sections ( .ONE files) from the package, then the bug, if it existed, would likely be in that code path. If they files actually existed on the hard drive, then the bug, if it existed, would likely be in our ability to display the sections.

So I went to look at the hard drive contents and noticed the sections were there. I looked in OneNote, and now they were displaying. I deleted everything and started over to see if I could reproduce the problem and I could not. I tried again and again and on the 5th attempt, I was able to sort of reproduce the problem. I say "sort of" since the sections in the section groups all appeared, but it took about 5-15 seconds to display them.

The problem turned out to be an excessively busy hard drive. I had a download tool running in the background downloading a 2.5GB file in the background (this was by dogfood machine) and coupled with a relatively slow hard drive, the disk simply could not keep up with the constant demands to write to it in a timely manner.

The bug properly got resolved as not reproducible and I closed it. The "workaround" is to wait for the hard drive to catch up.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Using the equations about screen size as a test scenario for OneNote

Last time I shared a page I used Word and Onenote 2010 equation support to figure out how much larger laptop screen were based on the diagonal measurement of the screens. I mentioned in passing that I would use this to test the implementation of our equation support, and I have. Here's what I am going to do with this work as time goes by.

First, save a copy of the page so I can refer to it from here on out. This is mostly a housekeeping type of item for me, but I've relearned the lesson about making backups often enough that I don't want to overlook it here.

Next, document what I did. I'll add a test case to our database that describes in general how I created the page, and the motivation behind it. What I'm trying to do here is let anyone else who runs the test to do two things:

1. Verify what I did to create the page works

1. Use her own way of creating the page. Maybe she wants to number each equation more like a proof, or lay out the data in two columns. In short, what I want to do is focus on the scenario: using Office to figure out laptop screen sizes, and not on the one single way I approached the problem. As an example of the variety which could be injected in this test, screen shots of the different laptops could be pasted into the document (and verify the layout still looks as expected after), or use Excel instead of OneNote napkin math to solve the equations.

This second point is the more critical of the two. This is more likely to uncover small design issues that may get overlooked in a step by step type of test approach. For instance, if the test specifies to only use shortcut keys for copy and paste, design or functionality which depends on ribbon buttons or context menus may not be noticed. Or the next tester may want to use OneNote only and avoid the copy/paste from Word. It's up to her to use her own way to complete the scenario.

And as long as the scenario gets completed with no muss and fuss, the scenario gets logged as a pass. If there is muss and fuss, we log a bug and examine what we can do to get the scenario passing.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Using Equation Support and Napkin Math in Onenote to solve a real world puzzle

I was thinking about getting a larger laptop with a much larger screen than my current tablet. At first, I naively thought the manufacturers would publish the screen size of their laptops. Naturally they don't - they only publish the diagonal measurement of the screen. Thinking back to high school trigonometry, I first thought I was stuck. To solve a triangle, I need to know at least one side length and two angles, or two sides and one angle, or all three sides. It didn't appear I had enough information to find out how big the screen was. I thought a little bit more and realized that since I knew the ratio of the width and height was either 4:3 or 16:9, I effectively knew all the angles of the triangle, and had the hypotenuse. I still had to perform a little math, and here is what I did. First, I tried using the Windows calculator, and that was taking far too long. I grabbed a scrap piece of paper and a pencil next, but then realized I could do all of this in OneNote after reading this article on slashdot.

Thinking a little bit more about this scenario, I figured this would be a nice end to end scenario for using both the "napkin math" feature in OneNote and our new Equation support in OneNote 2010. I also used Word to help format some of this, so here goes with a new testing scenario.

First, I figured out the height and width of my current 12.1" diagonal tablet monitor.  (I use Live Writer for this blog, and it converts math to images.  Bear with me, please).  Note: this is corrected as of Nov 3, 2009.

So at this point, width is 9.6 and height is 7.25. 7.25*9.6=69.6 square inches (napkin math!) for my 4:3 ratio 12.1" diagonal monitor. Since I did this step in Word to see compare their editing experience to ours, I can't show the napkin math to compute the square root of 52.5, or the computing of 'a' two lines below.

Now repeat for a 16:9 ratio and 17.3" diagonal screen. I'll leave out the redundant steps, and switch to OneNote to enter these equations.

The height and width of the larger screen is 14.9" and 8.4" respectively. The total screen size is 14.9*8.4= 125 square inches. Maybe it is not apparent, but that equation was solved with napkin math.

This is almost twice the size of my current monitor! 125/69.6= 1.85 times larger, to be more precise.

The experience between Word and OneNote was very similar for entering the equations. Having napkin math to quickly solve some of these was very nice in OneNote. Teachers, feel free to use this as a lesson plan :)

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Using Notepad to test OneNote

Someone came by my office this last week and saw me paste some information about a bug report I needed to file into Notepad. I was gently chastised for not using OneNote to keep track of this information. Of course, I had a reason for that and want to publicly explain why I still use Notepad now and again.

If you start OneNote and attach a debugger (such as windbg) you can stop the execution of OneNote code when you want. When you stop the execution, it's just like putting OneNote on hold - you cannot do anything with the application including even copying text from it. I think of it as stopping the engine on a car while you are test driving it. If you turn off the engine, the car cannot respond to your driving directions any more and this is the position I was in. I had stopped OneNote in order to get a snapshot of the condition it was in while I had it in the error state.

After getting the information I needed from the debugger, I pasted it into notepad as a temporary holding spot. I used the system clipboard to capture an image from the screen next and copied that to MSPaint. I cut off the extra stuff around the edge I did not need and saved the image. I also gathered some needed log files and made a shortcut to the TEMP folder on my desktop. I then used the data I had accumulated in all these different locations to see if anyone had reported a similar or the same bug already. Since no one had, I added all this information to a new bug report. Then I was able to go back to using OneNote.

Of course, if I had found a problem with a different application (like Outlook) I could have pasted the information into a page in OneNote. Then I could have taken a screen clipping and only gotten the minimum sized screenshot of what was needed to help explain what I was seeing. And I could have simply dropped the log files as embedded files on that single OneNote page. Instead of having three different locations to browse while I was gathering and collating data, I could have had it all on a single OneNote page.

Bonus: I really liked this tweet.  It just came through and caught my eye:

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Creating OneNote pages with just the title and no date/time stamp

Over the weekend there was a question on the iheartonenote.com site about creating a new page that does not show the date and time by default. This person did not want to click back into the date and time text and delete it each time, but did want the title visible. This is unlike using the WINDOWS+N key to create a new page in Unfiled Notes since that command will give you a completely blank page - no title and no date time either.

There is a way to do this and it only takes about a minute to create. First, open the section where you want to have the pages no longer show date and time when created. Then create a new page and highlight the date and time:

You can hit the delete key to get rid of them. Also, when you highlight each line of text, you can click the control that appears on the right to modify the date or time.

Now over on the page tabs control, click the down arrow next to the new page command. You should get this pop up menu:

Select the More Template Choices and Options… command at the bottom. If you can't get this pop up menu, you can click File | Page Setup to get the same behavior.

Now the Templates pane will open. At the bottom is a link to Save current page as template. Click it.

You will get this dialog. Just give your new template a name and check the box to make it the default for the section:

Click Save and you are done. Now new pages for that section will show the title bar but not have the date and time stamp on them!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Back to testing OneNote after a vacation

Just back from vacation and am getting back up to speed. Some random stats that are meaningless without context:

1. Number of new emails waiting for me: 2377
2. Number of new computers waiting for me: 1
   1. This is actually really nice. As we've moved away from physical boxes for our day to day testing and over to HyperV virtual machines, the most apparent limitation is RAM. CPU and hard drive speed are nice, but having more RAM lets me have more VMs running at once. The new machine has 16GB of RAM, giving me enough to run more than 7 VMs concurrently.
   2. Since I have my own servers in virtual machines, I can now connect from multiple clients running in different VMs and perform testing an verification with one physical piece of hardware.
   3. Multimonitor setups really make this nice.
3. Hours to set up the new machine: about 4. Need to install Windows, move a hard drive from the old machine to the new (it has all my virtual machines on it), then run some setups for miscellaneous utilities I need. I can usually just kick off an install of some sort or the other and leave the machine alone. For instance, as I'm writing this, our automation scripts are building on that machine.
4. Number of To Do items waiting for me: 11 (they are mostly pretty small)
5. Number of To Do items that got done while I was out: 4 (thank goodness for delegation)

So it's a pretty standard week and a half away. One of my coworkers here once stated he only liked taking time off near major holidays so work wouldn't pile up while he was gone. He wanted to avoid the problem of needing to work extra hard to get ahead before leaving, then extra hard again to get caught up when he got back. Interesting viewpoint, but I put some faith in item 5 above and that definitely helped lighten the load this time.

Once I get my new machine completely done, I can get back to using Fiddler to observe some OneNote network traffic and show how we use that in our testing.

Yep, that's it. Nothing else has happened around here while I was out.  Nothing at all.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Thanks a latte, Mr. Elop!

Those of you who follow tweets related to OneNote might have seen Stephen Elop send a message now and then. He is the president of Microsoft Business Division (this division includes Office) and like most of us, really likes OnNote. As part of our yearly Giving campaign, he showed up as a barista on our floor and made me a latte:

For a barista, you make a pretty good software guy, Stephen :)

Little surprises like this are always nice to see.

I'm going to be out for a couple of weeks and will reply when I get back.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

A OneNote haiku helps with the keeping a balanced perspective

This item showed up in email today:

A OneNote Haiku. This was written on our whiteboard by our coffee machines, and long time readers may know I've mentioned this before in an attempt at getting some testing completed.  For what it’s worth, I echo this sentiment and humbly suggest a change to make the first line read “My lovely OneNote.”

This week the topic on the board was simply "Office Haiku." I guess this one stood out to OneNote for two reasons. First and obviously, this mentions OneNote. In some ways, we are still the "new kid on the block," so any time we get mentioned creates a sense of pride.

The second reason this stood out (to me at least) was the last line - "Do not let me down." That's key for us and helps temper that feeling of pride mentioning OneNote brings. We don't want to lose your data, corrupt it, munge it, move it, lose it, prevent you from finding it, slow you down when trying to enter it and so on. No application ever wants to have this behavior, but when you are the "new kid on the block," it is twice as important to build that trust.

The lesson here is obvious - keep the trust intact.

Let me know if we don't.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Using Fiddler to test OneNote, part 1

A tool we use to track OneNote network traffic and behavior is Fiddler. It is a free tool you can download from www.fiddler2.com if you want to take a look yourself. It acts as a proxy and gives a pretty good log of what is going into and out of the computer for network traffic. For OneNote, we concentrate on http:// traffic.

There is a really good quickstart video on the website so I won't repeat that. Here's a simple example of what I see. I have my own DAV server running named JOHNGUIDAV. I have a shared folder in it named DAVDOCS. When I start IE and open http://johnguidav/dadocs (note the typo - the "v" is missing), this is what fiddler shows in line 1:

A 404 error. I think everyone that has been using the internet has seen this. It simply means that the item I am looking for does not exist - in this case, since I typed the URL wrong, nothing was found and the server returned the error.

Then I typed the URL in correctly and your see the two lines that show the traffic. The folder named davdocs was found which contains an index.htm file, and the welcome.PNG file was found. This is what the browser displayed.

Then I put focus back in the address bar of Internet Explorer and hit Enter. There was no new traffic at all. This makes sense when you think about it - most browsers cache copies of the files on the server so operations like this don't generate traffic or load on the server. I just reuse the files (the index.htm file and the image) without needlessly increasing the load on the server. Hitting F5 would force a refresh if I wanted to ensure I had the newest files.

The body column shows the size of the traffic, and the process shows which application is making the DAV call. So far we haven't gotten to OneNote, so I will walk through that next time. I'll also go into how testers use this to help isolate problems.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

I’ve been able to regress some bug reports

I started work today pretty happy - I hit "ZBR" right on the deadline for the first time in a long time today. "ZBR" means Zero Bugs to Regress. We use it as a goal to ensure that as bugs get fixed and assigned to test for verification, we do not let them pile up instead of ensuring the fix is proper.

Normally, I would have a few bugs assigned to me that are Active. They would typically need more information (like logs) or further clarification about the circumstances before a developer can started on a potential fix. Sometimes they can be dealt with very quickly, such as adding logs. Sometimes they take awhile to get the information. For instance, a question you may get is "Does this also happen in Windows 2008 Server at 1024x768 with Left to Right Language settings?" That is a fair question – and could very well be key for a developer to get started on a fix - and setting up a machine to get that information might take a little while. Getting answers to these is usually straightforward, but can be time consuming.  In general, Active bugs need to be turned around quickly no matter what, so they have top priority most of the time.  Fortunately, I was able to move these along quickly this last week.

Some of the bugs that are resolved can be tested immediately. I generally try to stay on top of these every day and not let them accumulate. Sometimes I get blocked by circumstances out of my control. I may need access to a particular server that is down or otherwise inaccessible so I get blocked from testing the fix. Sometimes the fix may need a fix in another application as well - in other words, to get our task linking working correctly, we may need the setup team to register our addin correctly. Without that working, there is no way I can test any fixes for this area.

Last week, though, all the pieces fell into place and I was able to get my slate completely clean. No blocking problems, everything built and installed correctly so I hit zero. Feels good.

Now the life of a tester takes over again and I get to do this again this week. And next, and next and next…

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Fun stuff in OneNote Test this week

It's not all hard work and testing OneNote around here. Some folks managed to get some Snuggies ™ yesterday and noticed the little pouch in front is the perfect size for a netbook. Here's a photo of Gary - with his netbook snugly in the Snuggie pouch- with yours truly in the background:

For the eagle eyed, Lin is in orange making the peace symbols in the background. 

The testing angle here is that we have netbooks "issued" to various testers to help ensure OneNote works well with that form of hardware. We look at characteristics from the smaller screen sizes (change we made based on that: we minimize the ribbon by default to give more vertical screen real estate to the editing surface) to the performance implications of the solid state hard drives they sometimes have.

I know we have OneNote Ninjas over at www.iheartonenote.com - but don't these folks look like bright blue Jedis?

Now back to work!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Quick note to register at the IHeartOneNote page

Nothing to do with testing OneNote, per se, but this looked interesting enough to share.  If anyone joins the IHeartOneNote.com community in the next day or so, you get entered to win a $200 Amazon gift certificate.

 Here's the blurb I was sent:

"If you haven't already joined www.iheartonenote.com, the world's one and only community site for fans of OneNote, you should head over to www.iheartonenote.com right now and register because everyone who registers between noon PST on September 22 and noon PST on September 29 will automatically be entered to win a $200 amazon.com giftcard."

While this is not straight up testing, this is another venue some of the OneNote team checks into now and then to see what everyone says about us.  I probably need to write about how this fits into my "Customer Commitment" for the year, and I will at some point.  For now, though, each year when I write my commitments ("goals") for the upcoming year, I include a commitment to engage our customers and use that engagement to make OneNote better.  It's probably easy to see how a site like this can help connect, so the real focus for the year is using those comments and questions into making OneNote better.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John