I found a bug in OneNote!

on Blog, Tech, Software

Copy pasting, how does it work?

I am an extremely heavy user of Microsoft OneMote, both on MacOS and iOS. I’ve been using it as my electronic lab notebook (ELN), for over 10 years at this point, and I’ve learned a couple tricks.

One of the nicest things about OneNote, is that it has never lost my scientific content - despite my using it on a daily basis, generally abusing it & force quitting it if it hangs, for over a decade.

In short, OneNote is properly developed “industrial grade” software, whose stability & development cycle & longterm support I have been quite happy with.

That is why I was so happy today to find a reproducible bug in OneNote on MacOS, where I could make it crash on command (it still didn’t lose any of my data though!)

A meme, with Dark Vader saying "When I left you, I was the learner, now I am the master!

Details below:

How to reproduce issue from scratch:

1) This is on MacOS 12.4 Monterey, OneNote Version 16.62 (22061100) - Desktop app
2) You have to make a .html file with a png image encoded as a base64 encoded HTML5 data URI. 
- The Zotero webpage snapshot functionality can do this, and the SingleFile addon for Chrome can do this. 
- HTML files/encoded images made from either Zotero or SingleFile will crash OneNote. 
- Note: This bug does not happen if a jpg is substituted for a png.
3) In MacOS Safari (Version 15.5 17613.2.7.1.8), right click the data URI encoded image and select the "Copy paste" from the dropdown menu. 
- Note: This bug does not happen if Safari is substituted for Google Chrome (Version 102.0.5005.115)
3) In OneNote, make a new table
4) Add a row to the table, 
5) In the newly made row, type "file://" , using shift & the left arrow keys after typing, select the file:// text. 
6) Hit Command-K to open the link editing dialog
7) Click the address dialog box, and paste the image. 
- It should show up as the base64 encoded data URI. 
- In the case of a Google Chrome copied image, nothing is added to the text field. 
- In the case of a copied JPG, in both Google Chrome & Safari, an http URL is pasted rather than an encoded data URI.
8) Hit command-Z to undo. OneNote immediately crashes.

In testing this bug, I was fascinated to trace it back to strange copy paste behavior - you have to copy a encoded PNG from specifically Safari. A JPG, or Chrome, doesn’t work. I think this goes to show, copy paste is a bit of a black box of user interface & user experience, and when bugs happen, then can be pretty subtle! The fact that the bug also involves undo functionality is interesting - that is another area of the software that seems ripe for all sorts of unexpected edge cases. Hope this helps Microsoft!