Indentation Errors in Impress' Bulleting Function

 

Summary

OpenOffice.org's Impress 1.1.0 presentation-making application has some errors realigning text after bullets have been removed. If a text box contains a bulleted list that has been indented, once the user returns to typing plain text, the text is unable to be returned to the original indentation.

Application Description

OpenOffice.org is an office suite including word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. Impress 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.

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.

For this presentation, we are evaluating the indentation sub-function of the bulleting function (indentation is an option within bulleting). When we remove bulleting from a text box, we expect to be able to continue typing in the same manner that we were before we used bullets.

Since we will be working with the bulleting feature, there are two icons in Impress that will especially 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. To manipulate the indentation, you can use the indentation feature, or simply press Tab to indent inwards and Shift-Tab to indent outwards.

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, such as "Here is the original indentation", then press 'Enter' to move to the next line.
  4. Click the button to add bullets.
  5. Press the Tab key to indent the bullet a step into the text box.
  6. Type a sentence at the bullet, such as "Here is where I will indent to" and press 'Enter'.
  7. Repeat step 6 once more.
  8. On this new line, press the button to remove the bullet and type a sentence, such as "Now I can't move the indentation back".
  9. Place your cursor at the beginning of the line and use Shift-Tab to try to move the sentence back to its original position

Results/Relevance

As we can see, the result of the test was not as a user would expect. Using Shift-Tab does not return the text to the indentation of our first line (the line that said "Here is our original indentation"). Even using the manual indentation buttons on the top horizontal menu in Impress also fails to move the text back to the original indentation. The only solution for fixing this is to start a new text box, which forces the user to spend time attempting to align and space the new text correctly with the old text, a difficult task.

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 on where the bullets are aligned on the page.

Also, by performing this exact test in OpenOffice.org's Writer, you may or may not find that some of the other applications in the suite suffer from the same bugs when bulleting text.

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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