How to Use 'Steps Recorder' to Send IT Bug Reports

Stop Describing Bugs, Start Recording Them

"It happened somewhere in the settings menu, I clicked a few things and then it crashed" is not a bug report IT can act on. Steps Recorder (also known by its old name, Problem Steps Recorder, and its executable psr.exe) fixes this by automatically capturing a screenshot on every click, annotating each one with what you clicked and where, and packaging the whole sequence into a single file you can attach to a support ticket. It's a built-in Windows tool — no install required — and it takes less effort to use than typing out a written description of the same bug.

Launching Steps Recorder

Press the Start key and type Steps Recorder, then hit Enter — or run psr.exe directly from the Run dialog (Win + R). A small floating toolbar appears with three buttons: Start Record, Stop Record, and a dropdown menu.

Recording the Bug

1. Click Start Record.
2. Reproduce the bug exactly as it happens for you — open the app, click through the same menus, do whatever triggers the problem. Steps Recorder captures a screenshot automatically on every mouse click and keeps a text log of what UI element you interacted with.
3. If you want to add context mid-recording — for example, to note "this is where it should have shown a save dialog but didn't" — click Add Comment in the toolbar. This lets you draw a highlight box around the relevant part of the screen and type a note that gets embedded right into that step.
4. Once you've captured the problem, click Stop Record.

Reviewing and Saving the Report

Steps Recorder immediately opens a preview window showing every captured step in order, each with its screenshot and an automatically generated description like "User left click on 'Save' (Button)". Scroll through to confirm it actually captured the sequence you meant to show. When you're satisfied:

1. Click Save (the disk icon or Ctrl + S).
2. Choose a location and filename. Steps Recorder saves as a .zip file containing an MHTML document with all the screenshots embedded — this is what you send to IT, not a folder of separate images.

The recipient doesn't need Steps Recorder installed to view it — they just extract the zip and open the .mht file in any browser or in Internet Explorer/Edge's legacy MHTML viewer.

Adjusting Capture Settings

Click the small dropdown arrow next to the toolbar buttons and choose Settings to configure:

• Number of recent screen captures to store: defaults to 25. Steps Recorder only keeps the most recent N screenshots to limit file size, so if you're reproducing a long sequence, raise this before you start recording or your earliest steps will get dropped.
• Save file as: MHT format is the default and the one most support tools expect.

What Gets Captured (and What Doesn't)

Steps Recorder logs mouse clicks and the associated UI element names, plus a full-screen screenshot at each click. It does not capture mouse movement without clicks, keyboard input by default (though it notes when text was typed into a field without showing the actual text, for privacy), or video — if the bug is something like a visual glitch, flicker, or animation issue rather than a discrete sequence of clicks, a screen recording is a better fit than Steps Recorder's click-by-click screenshots.

Wrap-Up

Steps Recorder turns a vague bug description into a step-by-step visual log that IT can actually follow, and it takes exactly as long to use as reproducing the bug itself — no extra writing required. Keep it in your back pocket for the app that only crashes "sometimes" when you do that one specific thing you can never quite explain over chat.