Four Ways To Get The Most Out Of Borland CaliberRM

We have been using Borland's CaliberRM for awhile now. Overall I really like the tool, but as I mentioned in another blog post there are definitely some issues. We tend to not let the user population and management have direct access which means that we have to be able to generate output in a variety of forms.

In this post I want to provide a few tips that have helped us to generate output in some pretty flexible ways.

1) Getting Appropriately Styled Headers In A Word Doc

Document Factory is the tool which uses a very simple set of commands in a word doc to iterate through your requirements and output them into Microsoft Word. Over time you will grow to love or hate document factory, but the reality is that while it may be difficult to bend to your will, it will generally let you produce the kind of documents that you want to produce.

One of the biggest issues that we have had is how to get doc factory to work with autonumbering. When we modified our existing requirements document templates to work with Document Factory and output the hierarchical numbers from CaliberRM, all of our items were numbered twice.

Plus it was impossible to get CaliberRM to use multiple header level styles. We ended up finding a macro on the Web that solves this problem. First you use a document factory template that labels the headers with special characters. Then you run the macro which parses the "." in the hierarchical number and applies whatever style you want. This is actually a very quick process and allows you to use whatever styles/formatting you want to format your requirements document

2) Getting The Images To Actually Be In Your Document Rather Than Be Referenced By Your Document

When we first started using document factory we discovered that images were not by default stored in the document produced by CaliberRM. What would happen is that we would send the document to someone and all the images would be broken.

It turns out that document factory uses a command called MERGEFORMAT /d which only uses links to images not the images themselves. Joe wrote a messageboard post on the subject here.

The short of it is that you need to reveal codes with Alt-F9. Then do a global search and replace "MERGEFORMAT/d" for "MERGEFORMAT". Hit Alt-F9 again to hide codes and then Ctrl-a to select the whole document. Then hit F9 to update all field codes. Save the document. The way we are sure that it has been updated is that the size of the document should be substantially larger.

3) Outputting A Subset Of The Requirements

If you select a requirement in the tree, then run document factory, document factory will give you the option to only generate requirements for the selected requirement and all its children. This is quite handy and we use it all the time.

More commonly though we use the requirements grid to filter a subset of requirements in the way we want and run document factory on those requirements.

4) Getting Tables Into Your Output

It turns out this is somewhat obscure. In document factory instead of using the BEGIN_SECTION and END_SECTION, you use BEGIN_ROW and END_ROW. Here is an example from a template that we actually use:

Sprint	Hierarchy	ID	Vers	Name	Priority	Status	Effort
$BEGIN_ROW $SORT{hierarchy} <<Release>>	<<hierarchy>>	<<id_number>>	<<version>>	<<name>>	<<User Group Rating>>	<<status>>	<<Expected Effort>> $END_ROW

You can either copy the table into a .dot Word template, or you can download a sample word template. Once you generate the Word doc with document factory, you can just open, select all, copy and paste it into Excel. The table will be maintained.

These are the most common ways of outputting in Borland CaliberRM. There are more advanced techniques as well that involve using the CaliberRM API. But we have found that these steps are good for most cases.

What tips and tricks have you found with Borland CaliberRM? Post your ideas below or put them on the messageboard at www.seilevel.com/messageboard.

5 Big CaliberRM Gotchas And How To Fix Them Part 2

In my last post, I covered three different CaliberRM issues that we've found with CaliberRM. In this one, I'll be covering five more.

Individual Object Delete

If you paste into CaliberRM and it doesn’t look right, it will be extremely difficult to delete it because you can’t highlight and select the delete key. You have to select each individual object and then right click and select delete. Trust me this is hard. The easiest solution is to cancel the save operation and it will revert back to the original state. CTRL-Z also does not work.

Tables From Word Are Too Big

Sometimes if you paste tables from Word they get messed up with one table going off to the right off the edge of the screen. In this case cancel the edit and then paste each table individually.

Caliber Shows Wrong Names

Sometimes caliber will show the wrong names in the tree structure as you click around. Don’t worry about it is just a screen defect.

Adding Files Only Adds A Reference

Do not use your local system as a reference. The best thing is to link to a UNC in SharePoint or other document management system. This isn’t as easy as you would think. With SharePoint, you need to view your file share in an explorer window. Navigate to the correct place. Paste the directory into the reference dialog box, then right click on the file select rename, copy the name, then paste the name into the dialog box. If you lose the link to the file i.e. kill vpn to SharePoint, CaliberRM will show the link as unknown. But once you restore the VPN connection it will be able to find the file if you try to double click it.

Adding Web Links Doesn’t Work

Adding web links seems to not work at all. You click the button and it just creates a blank link.

What workarounds, tips or tricks have you found in CaliberRM? We'd love to hear about them. Post them here or on our messageboard. If you have something that you'd like us to cover, let us know we'll do a post on it as well.

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.