Manually mapping Spanning Tree Protocol

Does anyone have a real-world process on mapping out the Spanning Tree of a network? Or do you use an automatted tool?

For example, what would you do if you walked into a new company and needed to map out their existing Spanning Tree?

nnbnbIf you are in a new company mapping out the spanning tree by hand can be a great way to get a better understanding of there network.

Get a device list, well... spanning devices. Log into each and ever one looking at the spanning tree info on each. Visio the entire thing out and make sure it looks like the existing documentation they have.

What I did was to get an app called called Treepad ( www.treepad.com/ ) I made a node for each device, and each device had a sub node with the different bits of info for that device. That way I had a quick and organized way to looking at it. Later i started adding more and more nodes to each device.

This is probably asking too much, but would you be able to provide an example of the actual Cisco commands you use and the information you find the easiest to use in order to map out the Spanning Tree?

I run "show spanning tree" and console vomits information at me.

show spanning-tree root

or just the "show spanning-tree ?" for more options