Taking a Screen Shot (in Windows)

Not everyone is aware of how to take a screen shot of their computer screen. Let me detail here a couple of ways you can do so. What this would do is allow you make a copy of either the full screen or part of the screen and inset it into another document, such as a Word file, a PowerPoint slide or email.

Full Screen

Press the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard. This will be found to the right of the F12 key up at top. It will not flash or anything, but it will have captured the screen. Now that you hav a copy, you need to paste it somewhere. Since it is an image, so you simply paste it into a program or you can edit it. If you wish to edit it, you first need to paste it into an editor. You have one- it is called Paint, and you can find it from your computer start button, under “All Files.” Open Paint, and they you can paste it into the screen there, and save it as a jpeg or png file. Otherwise, you can simply insert what you have copied into some other program. Editing allows you to do things such as paste an arrow onto the image, to highlight something, just as example. And of course, you can simply save the image you copied for later use.

Partial Image

For this, you need to use what is known as the Snipping Tool (not present in Windows XP, by the way). You can find this tool by again selecting All Programs from the start button, and opening it. When you do, there is a drop-down menu that allows you to select options such as “Free-form snip,” “rectangular snip,” and “full-screen snip.” These should be self-explanatory. And you can also choose the color of the border of your snip. Select your snip option, then click “New snip.” The screen will sort of fade and you can then select the area you wish to copy. When you stop, it opens a new window and you can then annotate the clip, save it as PNG or other, and use it. In this case, once saved you can open and copy it for insertion into other programs.

It is useful tool. If you have not used it before, give it a try.