Numbering Errors in Impress' Bulleting Function

 

Summary

OpenOffice.org's Impress v1.1.0 presentation-making application has some errors recognizing the intentions of the user when adding numbering to text. If there is already text written inside a text box, then adding numbering to a second group of text will cause the numbering to be incorrect. For example, text will be labeled as beginning with "2" instead of "1". Correcting the numbering requires the user to change the properties of the numbering to values that are not logical. The user must enter the properties of the numbering feature and tell the program to begin numbering at "0".

Application Description

OpenOffice.org is an office suite including word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. Impress is part of the OpenOffice.org suite, and is used to create powerpoint-like presentations. OpenOffice ships in most versions of Linux or can be downloaded for free from their official site.

For this presentation, we will be working with the bulleting feature. There are two icons in Impress that will be of importance to us. Along the top horizontal menu, locate and . The first button adds/removes bullets from the page and the second button allows us to alter the preferences of the bullets, including changing from bullets to numbering.

Test Design

This example demonstrates the use of Function testing. In Function testing, we evaluate the application by locating and isolating functions, then interacting with the functions and observing how well each can perform its task.

In this presentation, we are evaluating the numbering sub-function of the bulleting function (numbering is an option within bulleting). When we add numbering to a page, we expect the numbers to have an order to them, to start at an obvious beginning, and to maintain that order. For example, we expect them to begin with "1", then go to "2", then "3", and so on.

Function testing is a powerful testing technique in that we can see exactly what one function outputs from a specific input. In this presentation, we are giving an input of some text, and we are expecting an output of numbered text. We can directly observe if the function does this correctly.

Performing the Test

  1. Open OpenOffice.org's Impress and use File->New to create a new presentation.

  2. Use the Text Tool to create a new text box:

  3. Type a sentence into the text box, prese 'Enter' and then type in another sentence

  4. Highlight the second sentence and click the button to add bullets

  5. Click the button to edit the bullet preferences. Select the Numbering Type tab and select a numbering type to replace the bullets, and then click 'OK'

Results/Relevance

As we can see, the result of the test was not as a user would expect. Since we only highlighted one sentence, we expect the numbering to reflect this. To fix this, we must go back into the bulleting preferences, then to Customize, and tell the function to begin numbering from "0" instead of "1". Similarly, if we put five spaces in between the first and second sentence, the numbering would begin on "5" and we would have to start the numbering from a negative number to remedy the error.

The effect of this bug is dramatically increased simply in the difficulty for the user finding a workaround. Once the user's text is mislabeled, they must either go through the process described earlier of telling the program to begin the numbering of the bullets at an incorrect number or the user must create a new text box for the numbered text. Though this second fix sounds much easier, with it comes the problems of aligning and spacing the text boxes correctly. Both fixes are difficult and are not a logical step, meaning that they would not be immediately obvious to the user to do.

This bug is not critical and does not affect the file or program in any serious way, but it certainly presents an obstacle to ease of use.

Function testing allowed us to quickly and easily find this bug because we simply targeted one function with as few other variables as possible. By working with only one text box and all other options as default, we could see exactly how this function performed with the text that we had.

Similar Tests/Additional Notes

There are many bugs with OpenOffice's bulleting feature in Impress. To gain more experience with Function testing, try starting a new presentation and testing the bulleting feature for aspects such as alignment, spacing, and indentation. You'll find that Impress has trouble aligning and realigning bulleted text, especially after an indentation. Similarly, you'll find that text is spaced from the bullets differently depending where on the page the bullets are aligned.

Also, by performing this exact test in OpenOffice.org's Writer, you'll find that this application does not have a problem with misnumbering text due to other text being present.

Configuration Notes

Testing OpenOffice.Org's Impress v1.1.0 on:

Created 25 May 2004 for the CSTER

All images and written material ©Copyright Sam Oswald 2004

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