Hello everyone, and welcome again. Our today’s lesson is about, using “Print Screen” and “Snipping Tool” in Windows 10.
The “Print Screen” button available on your keyboard can be used to easily take “Screen Shot” of an entire screen, or a particular active window.
Sometimes you may require copying some contents from a web-page to word processing software, but then you found that right-click context menu has been disabled, or you are unable to select the text, as web page is protected. At that time, Print Screen keyboard button can be very helpful.
If you press the Print Screen button once, then it will take the snapshot of entire screen, and will save it to the Clipboard, which is a temporary storage application. Now, open any Word Processor and click the “Paste” button. You will have a snapshot of entire screen. You can then apply different formatting options on the snapshot, and if your word processor supports “Picture Cropping”, then you can even remove unnecessary portion of the picture.
But do note down that, if you will save this file, then it will be saved as a document, not as a picture. If you want to save your snapshot as a picture, then you have to paste it into a “Picture Editor”, like Paint Brush.
In the Start Search, type Paint, and then click on “Paint”. In Paint Brush, click the “Paste” button, to insert the contents from Clipboard. Click the File menu, and click Save command. Now, see the “Save as type” drop down menu. All the types that you are seeing in this list are different picture file types. You can choose any type that you wish, but the JPEG is the most popular picture format type. Type a file name, and choose the location where you want to save your picture.
Saving a snapshot as a picture could be very useful. A picture can be inserted easily in different applications. For instance, I can insert this picture file in WordPad, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and many other applications that support insert picture option.
Using Print Screen button, you can also take the Snapshot of a particular active window only. For instance, if you want to have the screenshot of this Taskbar Properties window alone, then hold down the ALT key from your keyboard, and then press Print Screen button. Now, clicking the Paste button will give you only the screenshot of the active window.
In Windows 8, Microsoft has introduced another way capturing the entire screen and saving it as a picture file with a single keyboard shortcut. For instance, in Windows 8 or Windows 10, if you want to take the screenshot of an entire screen, and later want to save it as a picture file, then just hold down the Windows Key and press Print Screen. Windows will immediately take the screenshot of entire screen, and will save it to the Screenshots folder under Pictures. This handy shortcut saves a lot of time, if you have to take several screenshots in your wok hours.
If you want to go a step further in capturing screen, like having a screenshot of a particular area of your screen, or you want to freely select the screen area that you want to capture, then you can use Snipping Tool.
Snipping Tool was first introduced in Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional & Ultimate editions, and continues to support in Windows 8 and Windows 10. To access Snipping Tool, click on Start button, and type Snipping Tool in search box, and then click on Snipping Tool.
If you click the drop down arrow alongside the “New” button, you can choose the area selection method. The default method is “Rectangular Snip”. “Click the “New” button, when you are ready to take a new snapshot. As our selection type is “Rectangular”, we will select the area by drawing a rectangle around it. As soon as you will release the mouse button, Windows will take a snapshot, and will open a new window from where you can save or edit your snapshot.
Click the “Save” button to save your snapshot as a picture. You can also save the snapshot using Control+S keyboard shortcut, or through File menu, Save As command. While saving the snip, you can see the same file types, which were also available in Paint Brush. I will recommend you to use JPEG format, to save the file. Now, you have saved your snip as a picture file, you can then insert it into any application you like.
It is not necessary to save all the snapshots as a picture, and later insert them into applications. You can also copy the snapshot by clicking on “Copy” command from Edit menu, and then click the Paste button inside your documents. After pasting the contents, if you close the Snipping Tools, then it will ask you to save the changes. So, the choice is yours either you also want to save the snip in a separate file or not.
If you want to take another snapshot, then you can click on “New” button. The background will then again get fade out, and you can select the desire area.
Snipping Tool will get automatically disappear, when you start selecting the area of your screen, so you don’t need to move it to the sideways.
You can also use “Free-form Snip” to draw freehand outline with your mouse, or tablet pen, or if you have a PC with touch screen.
To capture a particular window, you can use “Window Snip” option from the drop down menu. This feature works like ALT+Print Screen option, that I had described earlier.
To take the screen shot of entire screen, use “Full Screen Snip”.
You can also capture Menu, such as Start Menu, or other menu in any applications. But here is a problem that, after clicking the “New” button in Snipping Tool, when you try to open Start Menu, or any application menu, from keyboard, then “Snipping Tool” will get hide.
If you will try to open a menu through Mouse, then it will take the screen shot of entire screen, window, or rectangular area, depending on the selection in under New Drop Down Menu, or it may not let you open the Menu.
So to overcome from this problem, Microsoft added a new Delay option in Snipping Tool for Windows 10. This option is not available in the previous versions of Snipping Tool for Windows 8, and Windows 7. Click on Delay Drop Down menu, and choose for how many seconds you want Snipping Tool to hold before start capturing the screen. For instance, choose 3 seconds, and then open Start menu, and exactly after 3 Seconds, Snipping Tool will let you capture the area you want. This option is useful to easily capture Menu Bars.
To annotate on or around the captured snip, you can use Pen, Highlighter and Eraser tools in mark-up window.
If you frequently take Snapshots of the screen, then you can Pin Snipping Tool to Taskbar, or Start Menu, or you can define a keyboard shortcut key in the shortcut Properties window, so you may easily access Snipping Tool, while working in other applications.
So, this was all about using “Snipping Tool”, which makes it easy for you to capture your favorite screenshots.
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