In this Windows Tutorial, we will discuss about using “Print Screen” and “Snipping Tool”.
Many novice users are not aware about the uses of “Print Screen” button available on the keyboard. You can easily take “Screen Shot” of entire screen, or a particular window, using Print Screen button.
Let’s learn how to do this? Not everything that you see on your screen can copied and paste. So sometimes you get stuck when you need to copy some contents to your word processing applications. At that time, Print Screen button can be very helpful.
If you press the Print Screen button once, then it will take the snapshot of your entire screen, and will save it in Clipboard, which is a temporary storage application. Now, open any Word Processor and click the “Paste” button. You will have your entire screen’s snapshot inside your document. Now, you can 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.
Click Start, All Programs, Accessories, 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. For now, I am saving my file in the “Picture” system folder. We will learn in detail about Paint Brush in our next lessons.
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, but you cannot insert a “Microsoft Word Document” into “Microsoft Excel”.
You can also take the Snapshot of a particular window only. For instance, I want to have the screenshot of this Taskbar Properties window only. To do this, hold down the ALT key from your keyboard, and then press Print Screen button.
Now, if I paste this picture into Paint, then you can see that, we only have the snapshot of that particular window, not of the entire screen. So, this is how a single key from your keyboard can ease your work.
But sometimes, you need the snapshot of particular area of your screen, or you want to freely select the screen area. This for what Snipping Tool is.
Snipping Tool is only available in Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional & Ultimate editions. To access Snipping Tool, click on Start, All Programs, Accessories, and then click on Snipping Tool. If you frequently take Snapshots of the screen, then you can “Pin It” to Taskbar, or Start Menu, or you can define a keyboard shortcut key in the Properties window, so you may easily access Snipping Tool while working in other applications.
When you first open Snipping Tool, the background screen gets fade out. This mean, Snipping Tool is ready to take a snapshot, and you just need to select the area. If you are not yet ready to take a snapshot, then either click the “Cancel” button, or press ESC key from the keyboard.
You can click the drop down arrow alongside the “New” button, to see or change 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 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 want to save it 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.
To capture a Menu, first open the “Snipping Tool”, and press ESC to cancel capture. Now, open Start Menu, or a menu from other application, and press Control + Print Screen. Now from “New Drop Down Menu” choose any snipping style to capture the menu.
To annotate on or around the captured snip, you can use Pen, Highlighter and Eraser tools in mark-up window.
So, this is how “Snipping Tool” makes easy for you to capture your favorite screenshots. In our next video, we will learn some more interesting and useful features of Windows 7.
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