On the more technical side of Dr.Explain, given my particular programming background, I found myself very interested in how Dr.Explain analyzes the screenshots it is capturing in such a way as to identify salient features of the program I am documenting -- almost always capturing the things I am interested in documenting.

 

When this happens, Dr.Explain executes a "best guess" at the controls you would be interested in documenting, and generally does a very good job of it.

 

And Dr.Explain tends to err on the positive side -- creating callouts in the screenshots, rather than omitting them.  In this way, I can simply delete the callouts I do not need, which is about 10X faster than having to create new callouts for things I want to document that were already so identified.

 

However, I am also an idealist, and I know, from having done similar programming myself, that Dr.Explain makes a series of decisions while it is analyzing the screens I am documenting -- and it is my assertion that these decisions should be able to be controlled or at least guided by the end user (me).

 

To my delight, Dr.Explain provides a VERY flexible way of doing just that.  While Dr.Explain ships with an elaborate and mature decision list for analyzing these screenshots, that entire "decision list" can also be under your complete control.

 

Note that the intended audience for the following is programmers.  You can create GREAT help files with Dr.Explain without knowing any of the below.  So if you're not a programmer but want to be adventurous in seeing some of the "innards" of Dr.Explain, feel free to proceed.  :-)