Sunday, October 04, 2009 1:22 AM
Tom Decaluwé
Great Documentation Using Problem Steps Recorder
Windows 7 and windows 2008 R2 have some great new tools and one of the least know tools must be Problem Steps Recorder.
The tool itself was designed as an easy way for some one to record their steps and send off for trouble shooting. However I have found that this tool is also a great utility for creating very detailed documentation.
Give it a go and you’ll see it works better than any other screen grabbing utility!
Allow me to illustrate.
You can start the tool by typing PSR in the start > run window
Before you start you might want to bump up the amount of screen captures to include in the document depending on how many steps your install has
the value can be between 1 and 100 so if you have more than 100 steps in your install you will want to stop the recording > save and start an extra recording.
To start a recording press start record or what did you think ;-)
When recording you can see the time and the add comment pop up together with the pause and stop button.
You should now minimize the RPS screen and start executing the tasks you want to document.
By pressing the comment button you can add extra info into the documentation. It will be recorded as a separate step and then show up as illustrated in the following screenshot.
Continue to use the execute your tasks and add comments whenever you want.
When you have completed all tasks press stop and the system will ask you to save the file. The result will be a zip file containing a fully illustrated html file.
Open the zip file to access the document.
Double click the document and you will see the result.
As you can see below the screenshots are full screen pages and the active area is highlighted with green squares. Each step you have taken is in a separate screenshot and clearly marked with a timestamp.
Above each screenshot you will also find great illustration of what the exact action was that you did eg. left click, right click, press enter, input text,…
If you go above the set number of screenshots to save you will see this pop us like this
you can even easily copy/past or import into word if you want to add your own touch.
With PSR there really is no more reason why you would not have a fully documented environment.