My IT director wife showed me this one. I am often doing screen captures to illustrate blog entries, instructions manuals or support emails. I have been doing a Print Screen or Alt+Print Screen to send the entire screen or active window (respectively) to the Clipboard so I can get what I need. However, while the Alt+Print Screen does not often need to be further edited, I always have to paste the full Print Screen to Paint and then clip off just what I need.
All Programs->Accessories->Snipping Tool takes care of this. It even lets you annotate the snip and/or email it.
Once you launch the tool, you can pick New to start the tool. The New button/list has four options, depending on the shape of snip you need. The Options button lets you control more. Once you pick new, you are in snip mode and will not be able to do anything except snip or cancel unless you minimize the snipper first.
Once you pick what you want to snip, the snip goes to both Clipboard and to the snip editor, where you can highlight and annotate the snip.
There is also a hot key that will create a snip. Pressing CTRL+Print Screen will initiate a New snip. I find that most helpful when I am trying to snip a pop up menu or command line prompt
I've been using this for years and it's awesome.
There's a highlight tool which is great and when an oval/rectangle tool is added, it will be perfect.
Posted by: George Ali Blackburn | April 24, 2012 at 07:35 PM
I'm finding the Windows 8 Print Screen function pretty cool- hold down the Windows key when you hit PrintScreen key & it automatically saves a .png file in folder Pictures/Screenshots.
Posted by: Gary Curtis | November 21, 2012 at 12:15 PM