Documentation - Can it be easier?

Just a quick post to say that someone has showed me one of the best features I have ever seen in Windows and hopefully it will make life documenting installs and configuration so much easier than using Print Screen and Wordpad...



I am not sure whether it is in Vista but in Windows 7 you can run Problem Steps Recorder or PSR from the Run Command.  This will bring up a little window as shown:

Click "Start Record" and then you can record every click in every window or get it to record an install of a product.  You can add comments at each step if you want to using the "Add Comment" button.  For example I am going to record this blog post!  When you hit stop recording it will want to save the mht file which it has compiled in a zip format to keep it nice and small. 

If you double click the file you will be presented with a Record Problem Steps.  I believe this was built in to help software companies and Microsoft establish user issues when they have problems but why not use it for documentation!  You can then view the screen grabs it has made for you and do what you will with them. 

If you click on any of the images you can zoom in and get the full picture so that it can be copy and pasted into your documentation template.  Genius!