You can always identify a OneNote tester by the pages in the notebook

Our test team has a meeting every Monday to go over general status, tasks for the week and all the other items that all teams have meetings for at every company. I've been to many (many, many, many) meetings at Microsoft, and I'll estimate that over 98% of them use PowerPoint to convey status. This is expected since that is exactly what PowerPoint is designed for. OneNote is an exception to that rule. It's probably not surprising that we use OneNote in lieu of PowerPoint. We have shared notebook so this way the agenda, relevant links and other documentation we need is accessible to everyone on the team.

At Monday's team meeting, we were not able to use our normal test team notebook. Between the test server being in a partially upgraded state, the wireless network in our building acting up, the hardware problems (which seem to hit me the hardest) and a "bad case of the Mondays," Mike Tholfsen had to quickly create a page in his Unfiled Notes section of his computer to use for the overhead display.

When he had it on the display, it looked something like this:

What caught my eye were these two items (he actually had more of them than this, and this is my personal blog notebook UI, but I'm trying to make a point here. Bear with me):

This happens to testers all the time. We get a bug report that says "This repros with any text in the title." So when Mike is trying to narrow down a bug, he created the page "This is text" by typing some text into the title field. I can imagine where the "Untitled Page" came from as well. This is the type of quick action any tester will take to see if he can reproduce a bug - may he's checking to see if the bug is unique to a particular operating system, or only happens at a certain screen resolution or something similar.

One last clue I can get from Mike's notebook is that the bug(s) he was investigating probably did not have to be unique to shared notebook since he was performing these operations in his Unfiled Notes section.

But all that is reading a lot into the existence of these pages. Ultimately, I just thought it was amusing to see that on his machine.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John