Usually you will have to take a complete screen shot of everything on the screen, and then paste it into another program where you can edit the screen shot so that you can get exactly the part of the screen that you want. Then once you get the exact part of the screen that you want you will have to import it into the program you are using to create the user manual, and edit it some more.



All of these steps are time consuming, and can start to clutter your computer with many intermediate images. However if you use screen capture software to help you complete this task, it will be much faster, easier, and use less space on your computer.

Many screen capture software programs on the market today allow you to do many different things when you take a screen shot. When capturing the screen you can choose whether you want the entire screen, the active window of the screen, a particular section of the screen, a certain button, or some other section of the screen. Another great feature that is available in many of the screen capture software programs is the ability to add text, boxes, arrows, and other objects to the picture that you have captured.

I think the coolest feature available in some of the newest screen capture programs is the ability to use Flash to create interactive sections in your screen capture. This gives you the opportunity to allow a user to create content that the user can interact with as they are learning how to use the program. This is a very invaluable tool, because it gives the user some “hands on” experience will they are trying to learn the program, and since it is in the user manual, the user will not feel like they will break something if they do something wrong.