When you know something, sometimes you forget that other people don’t know them.
It has come to my attention that not everyone knows about the Snipping Tool in that comes with Windows. If you don’t know about the snipping tool, you’re welcome. If you do know about the Snipping Tool, then do your friends a favor and tell them about it!
When you want to take a picture of your desktop screen, you can press the “Print Screen” (PrtScn) key and it will be copied to your clipboard. If you want to take a picture of an active window on your screen, you can click the ALT key and the PrtScn key together and a picture of the active window will be copied to your clipboard. Once you have the image in your clipboard, you can paste it into a Word file or into MS Paint to see the image and then save it.
But there’s an easier way to get exactly the picture you want. Use the Snipping Tool.
When you open the Snipping Tool and click on “New,” your screen will fade and you’ll get a crosshairs tool. You can then select any part of your screen and it will be saved in the tool. You can pull down the arrow next to the “new” button to select free-form, a window or the entire screen.
The really nifty part is that you can highlight the shot, annotate it e-mail, copy it or save it right from the tool.
Search for “snipping tool” on your computer and then right click it and save it to your start menu. You’ll find all sort of uses for it. I promise!