Reporting Bugs

Even non-programmers can help to improve the OpenOffice.org software, for example by reporting errors and imperfections to the developers! Most of the time they take your report very serious, and it is impressive how many problems have been solved this way since the start of the het project.

The language in Issuezilla, the "bug tracking" system of OpenOffice.org is English, so you need some knowledge of that language. Even so it will not hurt to give some pointers on these pages already.

The English word "issue" in this context means something like "problem". When you encounter a problem when using or evaluating OpenOffice.org, and you suspect that it is caused by an error or an imperfection of the sopftware, you can "commit an issue".

To be able to do this, you have to be registered as a member of the OpenOffice.org project. This does entail not much more than that your email adress is known at the project, and makes it possible that you get a message whenever something has changed about the status of your issue ("solved", hopefully). Then, you have to be logged in. Note that your browser has to be able to accept cookies.

Of course, it is well possible that the same issue has already been reported by another user. Therefore it is best to start at the searchpage of Issuezilla. It looks quite complicated; fortunately most of the time you have to fill in only a few fields. Mostly I select all possibilities for "STATUS" (click on "UNCONFIRMED", then, with the shift key pressed, click on "CLOSED". This way I get to see also the issues that already have been solved in a build that has not been released yet. THen, you fill in at "Summary" or at "A description entry" some (English!) words of which you think they may occour in a short description of your problem. Click on "submit" to see the search results. If in the list shown are no bugs described that correspond with your problem, you can go on by clicking "Enter New Issue".

Now, indicate the part of OpenOffice.org that you think the problem has to do with. If you are not sure, no problem, select the one most likely.

Now you can input your issue. Try to give as much possible information that may help the developers: Instructions how they may call up the problem for themselves, which actions did you take to localize the problem, etc. Please also read the Issue Writing Guidelines before inputting an issue! It explains what the meaning of the diverse fields in this page are

I'd like to conclude with the following. If you are using a {xx} build of OpenOffice, it may be difficult to describe the problem well in English, because it is often not apparent how the menu's, dialogs etc. are called in English. You may look at the Multilingual OpenOffice.org Glossary in Spreadsheet Format (sdc) (see also here). {Note: your language {xx} may not be in this glossary. You may have to link to the appropriate one instead} You can load it in the spreadsheet module of OpenOffice.org en look up the corresponding English terms in it.

S.B.