writing steps along with the screenshot of the application or Windows is a very tedious tasks for any technical writer or blogger. What happens when windows provides you with the tool to automatically capture the screenshots and writes text for all your activities or mouse clicks. Well that’s true. Microsoft has provided a tool from Windows 7 onwards called “Program Steps Recorder” and the same is called “Steps Recorder” in Windows 8.
You can use Problem Steps Recorder to automatically capture the steps you take on a computer, including a text description of where you clicked and a picture of the screen during each click (called a screen shot). It is primarily designed for capturing the steps which causes an application to crash and the report thus generated can be used by a support professional or someone else helping you with a computer problem. However, the same program can be used to generate tutorials too with step by step guide along with screenshots. There would be certain corrections required in the text part to make it more meaningful for tutorials.
Follow the steps below to use the facility:
Step 1: Go to start and type “recorder” and select “Program Steps Recorder” in the list that appears
Go to start and type “psr” and select “psr.exe”
Go to Run Prompt (Windows key + R) and type “psr”
Go to your Windows Drive (C: in most of the cases) then open Windows folder. Open System32 Folder and search for “psr.exe”
Step 2: Click Start Record and minimize the tool. Now, go through the steps for which you want to create tutorial in your computer, and each step will get recorded on the click of your mouse. You can pause the recording at any time, and then resume it later.
Step 3: Once you are done with the steps to be recorder, Click Stop Record.
Step 4: In the Save As dialog box, type a name for the file, and then click Save (the file is saved with the .zip file name extension)
Step 5: To view the record of the steps you recorded, extract the .zip file you just saved, and then open the file using Word or any browser. We would recommend to open it in Word in order to make it easy for editing.
Now go ahead and make necessary changes in the text to make it more meaningful.
Same set of instructions can be followed on Windows 8 platform.