Have you ever wanted to create a quick how-to guide for someone without taking ages to create one? In this post, I take a look at the free version of Tango that lets you do just that. I personally love this tool because it saves me so much time when creating quick walkthroughs and it's super easy to use.
What is Tango?
Tango is a very useful piece of software that allows you to create step-by-step instructions and tutorials in no time. According to their website, creating such a guide can take as little as a few seconds, and that's actually true. Tango comes with a browser extension for Chromium-based browsers like Google Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, etc., as well as a desktop app which is a Pro feature though. Tango captures every type of action you perform on your screen as you perform that exact action, taking screenshots of each step and automatically creating descriptions for them. Neat!
With a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars on Product Hunt (at the time of writing) for ease of use, customer support, design, pricing, benefits and features, it's a highly rated and popular product on the market. Let's take a look at these features and how they all work.
Use cases
Tango can be used to demonstrate just about anything you do online by automatically creating digital guides. So most naturally, Tango is widely used in many industries.
It's perfect for onboarding new employees or customers, training existing employees, creating online courses, product and process documentation, teaching online, creating quick and helpful instructions for colleagues or friends and family, and much more. The use cases are sheer endless.
Who is this for?
Tango can be used by individuals and businesses alike. It is a handy tool for virtually anyone who needs to show or learn something. For example, it is used by teams, customer support, marketers, coaches, consultants, digital creators, web designers, teachers, human resource managers, etc...the list goes on.
How does it work?
It's very simple. Basically, three simple steps are required for you to create a guide.
The first step is to "capture your workflow".
Once you land on the page you want to create a guide for, simply click on the Chrome extension and then click on the big purple button to start capturing your workflow.
Tango will then automatically take screenshots of every single "action" you perform, such as when you click somewhere or type something, and then add descriptions for those actions, such as "click this button" or "type bla bla here".
Once you're done with that, you need to complete your workflow by clicking on the green checkmark in the bottom left corner and voilà, your guide is automatically populated.
The second step is to "Edit your guide".
This step is optional, as Tango already does this very well. However, if you want to customize your guide, you can easily do so.
In the left sidebar, you can see all the steps previously recorded for easy navigation. You can easily rearrange the steps by dragging them up or down.
On the right side is the main editor, where you can change or add text, create new or delete steps, upload additional screenshots or delete already recorded ones, and rearrange the steps to your liking.
If you're working with confidential information or have recorded something that's not relevant to your guide, Tango gives you the option to blur that piece of information after capturing your workflow. If you're a Pro user it allows you to blur sensitive information live while capturing.
The third step is to "share your guide".
Now that you've created your perfect guide, you can share it in different formats with anyone you want.
To do this, you can either invite team members via email to view your guide, create a link that can be shared, download the guide as a PDF file that you can then send via email, social media, or your preferred communication channel or even use the Magic Copy function to copy and paste your guide to other software that supports HTML such as Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Notion, Project.co, etc.
Tango also allows you to embed guides into your website, which I did below to demonstrate what that looks like.
Examples:
This is an example of what an embedded guide looks like.
This is an example of what a shareable link looks like.
For obvious reasons I won't have you download a PDF or paste the Magic Copy HTML here. 😄🤓
Pricing
Tango comes with a Basic and a Pro plan.
The Basic plan is free forever and allows you to have up to 25 workflows (guides) per user. You can always delete guides that you no longer need to make room for new ones should you run out of space.
Key features:
Capture Workflows in the browser
Image editing & redaction
Unlimited Workflow sharing and exporting
The Pro plan allows you to have unlimited workflows and an unlimited number of Pro users per workspace. You have the option of paying month by month or annually which gives you a bit of a discount.
$16/month - paid annually
$20/month - paid monthly
Key features:
Capture Workflows across Desktop
Remove Tango watermarks & Custom branding on PDFs
Blur sensitive information during capture (live)
Why use Tango?
Tango is designed to increase your efficiency and save you time. Now you don't have to spend hours or even days manually creating guides using Google Docs or Microsoft Word. It's really cool that the application is free and available to everyone to improve their daily life. Of course, with the Pro version you have access to more advanced features, however, the free version will do just fine for most people.
Conclusion
I love this tool since I'm a big fan of optimizing workflows and life in general. Tango helps me do just that! It's simple, powerful, efficient and effortless. I recommend you give it a try and see if you like it and if it can help you improve your daily life too. Hope you like this quick review and find it useful. Let me know in the comments what you think of Tango.