3 Big CaliberRM Gotchas And How To Fix Them Part 1

So we have been using Caliber RM for awhile now. Joy Beatty wrote about our selection process in a prior blog post. Since that time we have gotten some more experience and overall we are very happy with our choice of CaliberRM. However no tool in life is perfect and we are analysts afterall, so rather than post all the things we love about CaliberRM, here are some gotchas that we have found when using it.

Since we had a lot of projects in progress, one of the first tasks was to import a lot of docs into CaliberRM. It turns out that the import tool has a tough time, unless the document is very structured and makes extensive use of styles, so we ended up doing the imports by hand. These gotchas apply regardless.

Drag And Drop

Moving requirements around doesn't work quite right with drag and drop. You will find that sometimes no matter how hard you try it is incredibly difficult to move a requirement to the top of the list. It will either drop to the level above or you will drag the wrong requirement even though you definitely grabbed the correct one.

The key is to click the folder to move and wait a second, then when you move it make sure it is the right folder. The target position will be indicated by a line between folders, however that doesn't work if you are dragging a folder to the top position of a subfolder. Sometimes it was easier to just drag folders to the second position, then drag the first folder to the correct position.

You Can Only Paste Images

If you try to paste something that isn't an image (OLE object) it will show up as dead in CaliberRM as a tiny rectangle with an X inside. I will typically be gutsy and paste a whole section then go look to see how bad it looks. I will fix any images by hand.

a) If you did custom drawing in visio the easiest way to get them in is to cut the visio diagram and then paste special back into word as a bitmap. You can then copy the bitmap into caliber

b) If you did custom drawing in word itself it is VERY difficult to get in because you can’t copy and paste all the shapes into their relative positions. Direct drawing in word is by far the worst thing I encountered. I had to print the page to Snagit (screen capture/editing program) and then cut and paste out of Snagit into caliber.

c) Sometimes some images in word docs aren’t truly images but they aren’t Visio pastes. Just copy and paste as a bitmap.

d) Sometimes the object is an OLE object that when you paste as a bitmap the color scheme changes to an inverted color map. In those cases, pasting into MSPaint first helped. MSPaint proved to be the most reliable source for pasting images.

e) Sometimes CaliberRM will get into a weird state where it will paste the last image you pasted vs. the one that is in the clipboard. Restart caliber.

f) Sometimes CaliberRM will show you that you pasted the images but after you save they will all be gone. Restart caliber.

g) Sometimes CaliberRM will resize your image in a funny way. You can resize it back to the approximate shape. We believe that typically happens when you have an image embedded in a table. If you are able to find the frame of the cell sometimes you can delete it and paste the image outside of the table and it will size properly.

h) To delete an image in caliber you have to right click it and select delete. The usual paradigm of selecting and delete button doesn’t work

Tables Can Be Too Big

Some tables have a large amount of html and so a medium size table will actually exceed the 200,000 character limit of the fields. Turn change tracking off, remove formatting and pasting into excel first can all help. Pasting into excel took a 400k character table down to 200K and it looked exactly the same.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I'll cover 5 more CaliberRM gotchas.