One thing we are very proud of is our support team. Nothing seems to stump them. Many times when receiving support, your tech will ask you for screenshots. In fact, if you’ve ever received phone tech support in your life, there’s a good chance you’ve been asked to email a “screenshot.”
But many people don’t know there’s a better way.
There is a tool in Windows 7 called ‘Problem Steps Recorder’. It does exactly what its name implies; it records the actions performed by a user and produces a visual summary of that sequence.
For the discussion or troubleshooting of anything involving a sequence of actions, I find this tool to be much more useful than screenshots or only a textual description of the problem because it ensures that no steps are omitted.
A rather dull TechNet video demonstrating the utility may be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd320286
I find that the easiest way to start the utility is to type ‘problem steps’ (without hitting Enter) into the start menu’s ‘Search programs and files’ box and select ‘Record steps to reproduce a problem’ from the search results which appear in the menu.
You might want to create a shortcut or pin it to your task bar once it is running. Click ‘Start Record’ to start recording a sequence of actions and click ‘Stop Record’ when finished. After clicking ‘Stop’, it will prompt you for a location to save the recorded steps.
The file produced contains screenshots recorded at the moment of all user actions along with a textual summary of what those actions are (left click, right click, drag, etc.) and where they took place (the name of the window or button).
Areas of the screenshot are often highlighted to emphasize the context of the action. It does not record everything, unfortunately. For example- a user’s normal keystrokes are not recorded (however, most key combinations such as Ctrl+C are!).
If you use this tool, I encourage you to use the ‘Add Comment’ button to annotate the screenshot sequence with a comment and indicate a region of the screen that you are referring to. A region is selected much like the snipping tool.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you find it useful.
