I love documentation!

Documentation is the most enjoyable aspect of technology right?

Who am I kidding?! In all seriousness, documenting our work, whether it be for business continuity purposes, creating training material or when evaluating a new tool is critical. I used the find the process quite tedious and would use screen recording software to record lengthy videos and then take screen shots, which would require cropping, and then pasting them into a Word file.

Late last year, a friend and peer shared with me a neat tool built into Windows that substantially automates the process – Steps Recorder. You should be able to simply type “steps recorder” into the Windows search bar but the executable normally lives at the following location %windir%\system32\psr.exe.

Once running, you simply need to click the Start Record button and then go about your business. When your work is complete, click Stop Record and you will be presented with a summary of your actions down to the mouse click.

Saving your work will compress everything into a zip file. Extract the zip file and you will find an MHTML file.

Open the MHTML file in Word, edit and format to make it more readable (Hint: I like to change the page orientation to landscape) and save as a Word file or convert to PDF format.

Mind blown – happy documenting!