The active screen provides a snapshot of your application as it was when you made a point during the recording of the test. Also, depending on active screen capture options used when the test occurred, the page that appears in the current screen can contain detailed information on the properties of each object that appears on the page. This allows you to easily configure object and insert checkpoints, methods and output values of any object on the page, even if your application is not available or not a step in the test for the selected object.

When QuickTest creates an active screen page for a Web application that stores the path of images and other resources on the page rather than download and store images with your test. Therefore, it may be necessary to provide login information to view password-protected resources. Active screen pages for non-web applications are based on a single bitmap image capture of the visible part of the application window (or another high-level object) with context-sensitive areas, which represent each object that appears in the current screen.