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How to record steps of a Microsoft Dynamics NAV problem "professionally"

   
   As a Dynamics NAV developer/technical support there might be an instance where your client user wrote a mail describing his/her issue with a snapshot like this.




And you are like, “wow! this explains a lot, too much information to process. Hmmm. . ..”


After this you might exchange trail of mails or schedule a voice call or screen sharing session to understand this issue. Asking user to replicate this issue once again, so that you could analyze the steps or do debugging on that. This error replication process is time consuming (very unexpectedly) which kills valuable productive time of both support technical and users.



This all mumbo jumbo can be avoided if your client user is familiar or educated about a simple tool called Microsoft Steps Recorder, which is an inbuilt tool with operating system. 






To record and save steps on your computer:

1.    To open Steps Recorder, select the Start button, and then select Windows Accessories > Steps Recorder (in Windows 10), or Accessories > Problem Steps Recorder (in Windows 7 or Windows 8.1).
2.    Select Start Record.
3.    Go through the steps to reproduce the problem you’re trying to diagnose. You can pause and resume the recording at any time.
4.    (Optional) As you record, select Add Comment, use your mouse to select the part of the screen that you want to comment on, type your comment, and then select OK.
5.    When you’re done, select Stop Record.
6.    Review the record of the steps you followed to make sure it shows what you want it to show. Select Save, name the .zip file, choose where to save it, and then select Save. Now you can attach and send this .zip file to the person helping you troubleshoot the problem on your PC. It can be viewed in any web browser. 

 

You can find more on this tool from here:




   When you save a recorded session, it will create a zip file which contains a .mht file. The .mht file will look like this on your browser. You can review the steps as slide show, which is very cool feature and can explore more additional technical details.



I am sharing a demo .mht file which I created during my steps recording session.

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