OneNote Testing

A challenge with helping OneNote users

One point of confusion that can come up when we try to help OneNote people with questions is understanding the exact question being asked. For instance, I saw this question on the discussion group:

"If I am typing a series of notes as separate 'paragraphs', how can I start a new paragraph from the keyboard?

<snip>"

The key word here is "paragraphs" - when I think of paragraphs, I think of written prose and the construct used there. Applying that line of logic to this question doesn't make a whole lot of sense. "Just hit enter" would be the response, and that seems far too obvious to be useful.

So I made a guess that the definition of "paragraph" this user was using was what OneNote calls a container on the page. It's the little box outline that gets drawn when you start typing to show the boundary in which text flows, among other things.

So I had to guess when I replied that hitting the down arrow a few times will move the cursor out of the current container and make a new one.

This is what it looks like after I created the second container.

In this case, my guess was correct - this is what the user wants. My method of creating the second container is a bit much for this user, so I will see what else I can find. I'm just glad my definition of container matched the definition of paragraph. Otherwise, we could have gone back and forth for quite a while before we both understood the same question in the same way.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Follow up on the monitors

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Gary had some extra monitors sitting in his office. I wanted to know why he had so many of them and what they would be used for. Here’s the picture of what he has set up now:

Starting at the bottom left is his netbook. We got some of these to make sure OneNote was usable on their smaller screen surface. Here's a tip (sort of off topic, but bear with me): you can minimize the ribbon to give yourself more vertical room with the little arrow in the top right:

It's highlighted yellow here.

Next is a test machine with notepad running. I've mentioned before that sometimes we have to use notepad instead of OneNote if we are trying to debug a OneNote problem. Going up from there, the monitor with all the graphs is set to monitor one of our SharePoint servers. He's looking at memory usage, CPU usage, etc… Same thing for the monitor below it and to the right.

His tablet, at the lower right, has OneNote running (finally!). I don't know why he has a sticky note on it - maybe someone else jotted something down and left it with him…

Not really sure what the monitor in the middle is. Probably hooked up to a junction box and the keyboard, mouse and monitor all get switched around when he needs it.

Anyway, since I had mentioned this before, I figured I would follow up. Of course, all the monitors from the first time have not been accounted for...

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

A nice tip for a Windows theme to work with OneNote 2010

Sigh.  Somehow or other I have seem to have lost my permissions to install our internal builds of Office 2010.  This means I can’t upgrade to our latest versions.  And, naturally, I only found out I lost permissions after wiping the OS on my tablet (I’m going to run with Windows XP for awhile) and uninstalling from my desktop.  So as it stands right now, I have no OneNote to use for work.  I wanted to copy and paste some notes from email (using Outlook Web Access, of course) and I hit Windows + N to create a new sidenote for filing.  It did not work and I was stuck for a few seconds wondering why, until I realized OneNote had been uninstalled.  It’s shaping up to be “one of those days.”

Enough of that, though.  Reader “MMD.TV” was paying attention and noticed that the Zune Windows theme Microsoft gives away actually makes OneNote 2010 easier to see (at least on the monitors I tried).  You can download it at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078.  Like I mentioned, I tried it on my Windows XP machine and it looked really good.  I would include a screenshot, but I don’t have OneNote installed…  Again, sigh.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

A pet peeve of mine when logging values in our automation scripts

Way back in November 2008 I mentioned a code review of some test scripts.  I remembered something I saw many months ago (more than a year?) and this reminded me I wanted to revisit it.

The purpose of most of our automation scripts is to verify that the functionality we expect to be in the product actually works.  It's a pretty simple concept to understand so I won't belabor it too much.

Suppose, though, I had a script that adds a section to a notebook.  One of the verifications I would need to perform would be to ensure the number of sections increased by exactly one.  I also need to add this information to my log file so that I can have some trail to investigate if something goes awry.

Here’s some pseudocode to do this:

Int numberOfSectionsBefore = Notebook.GetSectionCount();

Notebook.AddSection("My New Section Name");

Int numberOfSectionsAfter = Notebook.GetSectionCount();

A verification I have seen some people use is

If( numberOfSectionsBefore != numberOfSectionsAfter-1 )

{

Log.Append("Number of sections does not match");

//fail the test, exit

}

It turns out seeing this type of verification is a pet peeve of mine.  While it works, it does not tell me the whole picture about what happens if the values do not match.  I can think of three ways this could fail:

1. The new section did not get added, so the number of sections remains unchanged.
2. The new section got added, but somehow an existing section got deleted, so the number of sections remains the same.
3. Two (or more sections) got added, so the counts are off by 2 instead of the expected 1.

And there are a ton of variations of these cases you can imagine for yourself.

To help isolate what might have gone wrong, I would add some code to log the values as well:

If( numberOfSectionsBefore != numberOfSectionsAfter-1 )

{

Log.Append("Number of sections does not match");

Log.Append("The number of sections before adding was " + numberOfSectionsBefore );

Log.Append"The number of sections after adding was "+ numberOfSectionsAfter);

//fail the test, exit

}

And then I would probably also log the section names that exist to help out if potential error number 2 was hit (to help differentiate it from case 1).

Kind of boring and basic, I know.  But I think this needs to be done all the time.

Oh, and we have methods in our automation system that will log values being compared automatically, so there really is no reason to miss logging something obvious like this.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Looking at a notebook which is shared on one machine but not the other

While showing off OneNote a while back, I had a notebook open on 2 computers. The notebook was stored on the first computer which happened to be named \\johngui-xp2. I had it open with OneNote 2010 on that machine and with OneNote on a second machine named \\taco .

When I opened the notebook on the first machine, the \\johngui-xp2 machine, this is what the navigation bar showed:

On the \\taco machine, I saw this:

Notice the big green icon on the second machine. This means OneNote thinks the notebook is shared and the icon tells me the status of the sync state - whether or not the notebook is up to date. The first machine does not have that icon - OneNote thinks the notebook is not shared.

Both are right, and here is why.

From the first machine, \\johngui-xp2, the notebook is simply a notebook truly on that computer. It is stored in a folder named "local" on that machine's D: drive. It gets treated like any other notebook stored on that machine. OneNote really does not have any way to tell I have shared that folder (with myself) and have actually accessed the notebook from another machine.

From \\taco, the OneNote can see the notebook is not on the local machine, so the sync mechanism we has kicks in and the UI to show the state kicks in. It's not that the notebook is shared among users. I am the only user with access to that notebook. The reason OneNote displays the icon this way is because the notebook is shared across machines.

Oh, and the darker color for the navigation bar is because I have the Black theme applied (you can see this in the beta with File | Options). Easier on my eyes.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Monitoring the OneNote test hallway

Testers at Microsoft are busy. I know that is a simple statement to write and not all the ramifications of it are immediately obvious. You may see a change to some feature (like spell checking, for debate's sake) and be asked to test this across all languages to ensure correctness. Fair enough - but then you notice the change works, but seems a little slower. Now you get to work through some performance testing as well. Then if you notice a new string being checked in does not fit into the spell checker dialog, you get to focus on some UI cases, and so on…

The point being that when you get a bug fix to regress, you may need a wide variety of machines to use to test the proposed fix. I've mentioned our reliance on HyperV before to help with this, but for performance and UI testing, there is not really a substitute for real hardware. That means it is not unusual to see a tester with a pair of tablets to verify behavior, or booking resources in our configuration lab to use their hardware selection.

I went into Gary's office (of Image Rotator fame) office yesterday and saw something a little different:

I haven't had a chance to ask him what all the monitors are for, but I'm sure there is a plan somewhere…

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

PS: sorry for the bad pun in the title.  Couldn’t help myself.

OneNote project for Azure support (iPhone and Palm Pre)

I was pointed at a really slick OneNote 2007 project over at CodeProject. Lionel Laske has put together an Azure application that syncs his notebooks to the iPhone and the Palm© Pre™ . Here's a teaser with what it looks like on the Palm Pre:

It looks great!

It's read only - you can't edit the content on the device. And I don't quite understand the billing model, but I am very impressed with what this accomplishes. Last thing - you have to be online to view this - there is no offline capability here.

It may sound like I'm being harsh and pointing out limitations. I hope it doesn't come across that way - I'm very impressed with this and makes me wish I had one of these phones to try and test it!

The project is OneNote on iPhone and Palm Pre using Windows Azure. Its’ hosted on Code Project, which is a really great site with thousands of tutorial style projects that cover just about every type of task – I really recommend them.  Here's the abstract for the project if you need a little more incentive to go check it out:

Abstract

This article will show you how you can synchronize OneNote on Windows Azure using OneNote API and Azure Blob Storage. Then, you'll learn how to develop an ASP.NET application to access it from an iPhone and a WebOS application to access it from a Palm Pré©.

Pasted from <http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/rinocp.aspx>

Let Lionel know what you think!

(And the tester in me is looking forward to copying everything from this article and pasting it into Windows Live Writer to create this blog entry. This is a somewhat interesting set of content to copy and paste. It has embedded images, links, colors in headings, and the copyright © and trademark ™ symbols.  --- Now that I pasted, the only thing lost was the color of the word “Abstract”.  The original color was yellow.  It pastes properly to Word, so I suspect I am seeing a bug with Windows Live Writer.  Need to figure out how to follow up with them…)

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

A partial pile of paper printouts

One of the many test tasks we perform is verifying that we can print to a wide variety of printers (physical printers, not just print to XPS or Print to OneNote). I've mentioned the lab we have before and even shown a photo of it there.

I was walking down the hallway the other day and noticed our tester who verifies all the printouts was busily engaged in her tasking. Here is what a chair in her office looked like:

This is a pile of the printouts she made in our lab. She goes through them page by page to verify we are printing correctly across the variety of printers in use. This is just the black and white pile - she has another pile of color printouts elsewhere.  That’s why I said “partial” in this blog title. Plus I love alliteration.

I've always thought work like this was pretty slick - you get to install a huge number of printer drivers, print for a day (or two, depending on if the printers need toner, paper, etc…) and then you get to block out time to look through the results and verify no errors. Plus, repro steps are usually pretty easy - "Here's what the printout looks like." Having a physical manifestation of a bug report makes it very easy to understand what went wrong (if anything).

There is a hidden lesson here, too. Looking at that pile of paper makes me think of what would happen if it got dropped or disorganized, or thrown into recycling by accident. All that data would be gone. It's thinking like this that resulted in our Send to OneNote printer - the printouts are stored electronically, can be searched, archived, backed up and you don’t have to worry about refilling toner, ink or paper.

But for those of us that need physical printouts, at least we know OneNote can handle the variety of printers out there.

I just want her to get finished so that the comfortable chair is back and ready for human use <grin>.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Some perf tweaks I need to keep in mind if I report a bug

A question I get asked now and then is what condition my "dogfood" machine is in. For instance, if I file a bug about not being able to connect to a shared notebook, I need to mention any networking tools I may be running that could affect the syncing. If I had a tool running that slows down my network connecting by injecting a five second latency to every request and response, I really need to state that in the bug report before anyone spends time investigating.

A separate set of tweaks that finds their way onto all my dogfood machines are performance related. Windows gives me the capability to turn off some of the advanced UI features. They are nice to have, but I prefer to give them up in favor of a simpler UI. Rather than walk through each one in detail, here is a screenshot of how I have my tablet set:

You can get to this dialog yourself by right clicking My Computer and selecting Properties.

Then click Advanced System settings.

Then the Advanced tab then the top Settings button. It's buried in there, but still can be found.

(On Windows XP, you can skip that second step).

Notice that by default all of these are on. I turn off the fade into/out of view functionality and the smooth scrolling/sliding UI. I don't have anything against these features: I simply prefer not having them on. A (very) small performance boost is also a nice side effect. I can't say I've noticed a change in performance from these changes, though. Eagle eyed readers - the top 2 items that got cut off in this screenshot are ON for my dogfood machine.

The only thing I need to remember if I report a UI based bug is to state which settings I have toggled from the default.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

A quick look at numbering in OneNote 2010

If you've downloaded the beta for OneNote 2010, you may have noticed we tweaked the way we handle bullets and numbering a little bit. Here's an image of what we did in OneNote 2003 and OneNote 2007:

Notice how they are offset to the left of the text? This was taken from my blog in January 2008, btw (see it at http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2008/01/17/a-summary-of-the-onenote-powertoys-from-the-test-team-for-2007.aspx).

Here's what they look like in OneNote 2010:

Notice how the numbers align under and to the right of the heading? This was a change we made based on customer feedback and I think most people will appreciate it. I don't want to go into the testing of it, but I would like to point out that if you looked carefully at this very carefully over the past few years, you may have gotten a glimpse of the new behavior now and then. It all depends on how I actually create this blog article, though. Since I need to test OneNote with many different blog utilities, I can't rely on just one method to get my text from OneNote to my blog.

For a while, I used the "Blog This" command in OneNote. This goes through Word, and numbered lists sent to it appear with the same offset that OneNote uses. This explains why my blog article in January 2008 has the 2007 format for bullets.

Jump over to my entry earlier this week at http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2010/01/04/powertoys-from-the-onenote-test-team-for-2009.aspx. Notice the right aligned bullets? I was using OneNote + Windows Live Writer this week, so the bullets appear with the OneNote 2010 behavior.

To me, this is kind of interesting when I look at this blog over time. It's satisfying to see how we've changed our behavior over the time I've been on the OneNote team.

Slick? Yes, no or something else?

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Powertoys from the OneNote test team for 2009

The test team has been very busy this year working on OneNote 2010 (you can get the beta here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx). While we have not had a tremendous amount of free time to create powertoys, I can still dig up the ones that we gave out this year.

1. Adapx Page Expander: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2009/03/09/a-powertoy-to-make-using-adapx-pens-for-onenote-a-little-easier-for-me.aspx. This merely expands a page from a given size to infinite in each direction.
2. The AutoHotKey script: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2009/04/02/a-really-great-tip-to-make-getting-information-into-onenote-much-easier.aspx. Not really from the OneNote team - Jordan Knight gets credit for this one. A little setup work is required, but the payoff is very nice.
3. Highlighted Text finder: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2009/08/24/a-beta-powertoy-for-onenote-2007-to-extract-highlighted-text-from-a-page.aspx. In Beta since it only works for English text, but finds and extracts highlighted text from a page.

Like I said, not a tremendous output. But OneNote itself is so great, what else do we need to add :) ?

If you want to write your own addins, a great starting point is the OneNote Developer Center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905452.aspx. The schema reference is a must read as well - it would have saved me a few hours had a I read through it before starting on some of my addins.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Equations and TEX support for OneNote 2007

Couldn't miss the chance to pass this along.  Dragonshorn Studios released a TEX (equation) editor addin for OneNote 2007.  You can get it at http://dragonshorn.info/?page_id=372

 I have not yet installed or played around with this yet, but it looks very interesting.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

Tag Summary and other test cases for tags in OneNote

Here is a test page I created to help explain some further testing around tagged notes.

There are 5 items that need me to take action on them (4 exist only in OneNote and the 5th is linked to Outlook). One of my "action items" is important and has a star next to it to remind me, and another is highlighted for some other reason. If I click View | All Tagged Notes, this is the Tags Summary pane:

If I only want to see unchecked items, this is what I get:

The most obvious test case to me, as a former Outlook tester, is whether or not the Outlook task item flagged to be done by tomorrow will show in OneNote if I mark it complete. Logically, it should not be shown since there would be nothing for me to do after marking it completed. Jumping over to Outlook, I marked it complete and clicked the Refresh Results button:

And it was removed. Other tests to run are marking it complete from within OneNote (right click | Mark Complete) or deleting the task from OneNote and verifying it is removed from the Tags Summary. To be even more thorough, I would delete the line item from the OneNote page, delete the page, delete the section, section group, etc… to verify the Tags Summary.

Moving on, the last test I want to cover here is the Create Summary Page. For this very small example, I selected to show all items, not just unchecked and this is the page that was created:

Notice the duplication of the "This is to do and important" line item. Since it has 2 tags, it shows with both. This is expected - if I'm trying to zero in on my "Star" tag, I would definitely want this item shown here. I also want it to show in the "To Do" category since I presumably have some work to do for it.

This summary page creation is a terrific feature of OneNote. Very powerful, very usable and just about everyone really appreciates it.

Another nice little feature is showing me when the Outlook task is due for that item, in this case "Tomorrow". The verifications here would be checking to make sure the Date Due string matches the tag when I applied it. Highlighting is an interesting "tag" - it does not get separated. If I wanted that information on its own page, I would use my powertoy .

What is interesting to me as a tester even with these cases covered is what is NOT covered. Some examples of that are the UI behavior for many more tags (do scrollbars appear? Do they work? Etc..), performance, cases for Windows Desktop Search being installed and not installed, working through the options in the two dropdown boxes on the Tags Summary page (search locations and grouping of the results), text that caues word wrap to fire in the summary pane and many more. One last "trick" I'll throw out there that we test - the Tags Summary pane is undockable. If you click the upper left of the pane, you can drag it out and let it float around. Neat feature, and another set of test cases to run!

I'm taking a break for the next couple of weeks from this blog as well. Gearing up for a big (BIG!) 2010!

See you then!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Working with and testing To Do lists in OneNote

Every so often, I'll get the same or very similar questions all at once. I'm not sure why this happens, but this last week I received several different variations of this type of request.

"I wish there was a way to quickly mark and find all my To Do items."

Well, there is, and I'll show the feature first then explain a little about how it works.

First, the easiest way to tag an item (a piece of text, a picture, etc…) is to apply the "To Do" tag. There is a keyboard shortcut for this (CTRL + 1 is the default) and the Standard toolbar also has this right at the top of the Tag dropdown:





I have to paste an image here since my blog software won’t recognize the “To Do” box from OneNote as an image…

 

Now you can use the Search feature in OneNote indirectly to look through all your pages to find tagged notes. Click the Show All Tagged Notes command from the Tag dropdown. This is also on the view menu (I wrote about this a bit differently in August).



And there will be a task pane that opens and shows all the check boxes you have:



When search runs, it will find both the checked and unchecked items. If you only want the unchecked items to show, the Tag Summary pane has a box near the top to only show the unchecked items:



This also filters out all the other tagged notes so you can see what you still have to do. You can refresh the results and create a single summary page by using the two buttons at the bottom of the tag summary pane:



The summary page is especially useful if you have items scattered all over the place and want just one place to see a master list.

OK, that is the whirlwind tour of the feature. Since this is based on search technology (that is what is used to find the tagged notes), there are some standard test cases which are obvious. Installing Windows Desktop Search (built into Vista and Windows 7) onto Windows XP will allow an index of all your notes to be built. Then when the search is triggered the index is searched rather than going page by page through all your notes to build the list.

In turn, that leads to some other testing. If the index is not done, the pages get searched one by one. This ensures that you get the data you want when you are trying to get the list created. Either search method will also get re-triggered if you click the "Refresh Results" button.

You can also see the amount of time the search takes by looking at the top of Tags Summary - there is a "Searching…" with a clickable Stop link, or a "Search Completed" string. This gives you a visual indication of whether the list you have is complete or is still being built.

There is a lot more to testing this feature with tags and searching. For now, though, I just wanted to explain the feature here since it has bubbled up a little this last week. Have fun with applying and searching tags!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Printing pages with the Adapx pen, and a plug for an old OneNote powertoy

Did you see Adapx updated their software 2.0 for the CapturX pen? You can finally print your own pages to use with their pen and then import the ink to Onenote.

I've already tried this a little bit and it works pretty well. The pen has always worked with the physical notebook they give you with the pen and the big change for 2.0 was the new paper you can print. Here's a photo of what it looks like:

(I really need to get a better camera…)

It only prints 8 1/2 by 11 (hopefully only for now. I really want to print a smaller size page to mimic a small, spiral bound notebook). What I do is cut the paper down to a more manageable size - it seems to sync well, with the data I wrote appearing in the upper left of the page in OneNote.

Sync still works great and the data gets imported as ink, so converting to handwriting works. If you have one of these pens already, the 2.0 software is here.

And a free plug for my own powertoy. Capturx still imports the same page size as the physical piece of paper. I prefer infinite size paper so I wrote an addin to change the paper size for me. It's here.

Last thing: if you have never seen this before, the folks over at GottaBeMobile have a good video of what it looks like, how to set it up and such at their site.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticism always welcome,

John