Update January 2020: Stepshot.net has been purchased by UIPath.  You can read more about it here.

Have you ever had the painstaking task of creating a step by step guide?  You start with a word document, then you take a screen shot, you edit that screen shot, you paste into word.  Then you have to type a description of what to do “Click “Next” Button”.  Now we are ready for step two…  rinse and repeat!

I’ve been trying to get back to my blog for a while, but I’m also lazy with things I have to do over and over again.  Like many developers if I have to do something repetitive more that three times, I’ll find a way to write a script or write custom code to do it.  I’ve moved back to working on my home turf of Integration.  But now extending beyond BizTalk Server and into all the different PaaS, iPaaS and Serverless services inside Azure.  So I’ve got lots more coming on “Integrating the Cloud”

But back to this topic.  Some of you might remember the Windows utility called Problem Step Recorder (PSR)?  It was used with Windows 7, but most users did not even know it existed.   It’s seems like with so many good utilities that Microsoft has abandoned it,  I believe you can still run it on Windows 10, but doesn’t seem to be greatly improved.

Anyways after a bit of research into different utilities out there I finally came across an awesome tool called StepShot Guides.   This tool is an advanced version of PSR and so much more.

It’s so easy, you just run the application on your desktop, and it takes a screenshot anytime you click, and captures the text at the same time.  In the background its automatically creating a document of what you are doing.  When done you click on stop and edit the steps and screenshots as required.

On Windows 10 if capturing screens with text off of a web browser its currently most accurate in IE11.  Chrome and Edge the text captured is more generic.  I have emailed the company and a lot better OCR capturing is coming soon.

Take a look over at stepshot.net…