Screenshots in Your Documentation
It's always important to provide illustrations in your user and training materials. Make sure that the screenshots look professional.
Don't use real customer data in your examples. You have an obligation to protect confidential or sensitive data. (If you haven't looked at yours lately, you may want to look through them.)
If you use technology or a graphics package to obfuscate or cover sensitive information, make sure that someone can't take the layers apart to access the data.
Make sure that your screenshots match the step that you're defining. Make sure all field names and titles match.
Don't use real customer data in your examples. You have an obligation to protect confidential or sensitive data. (If you haven't looked at yours lately, you may want to look through them.)
If you use technology or a graphics package to obfuscate or cover sensitive information, make sure that someone can't take the layers apart to access the data.
Make sure that your screenshots match the step that you're defining. Make sure all field names and titles match.
Posted by Crazy for Words at 3/10/2010 7:09 PM 
Categories: Technical Writing and Editing
Tags: Technical Writing
Categories: Technical Writing and Editing
Tags: Technical Writing
Snagit has a handy feature called Blur that can be used to, well, blur user logins and passwords before I insert screen grabs into documentation. Very nice to have.
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It's not only customer data that should not be visible, but it's also your own data. For example, if you take a screen capture of a web application, don't show which web sites are open on other browser tabs. Don't show which programs are visible on your task bar. Avoid showing version numbers, and dates and other things which may soon be obsolete.
For a list of good screen capture and post processing tools, see http://www.indoition.com/screen-capture-tools-survey.htm
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