How to make screenshots - tutorial

Tip from ClifNotes on 26 Oct 2005

Notes

Here's a quick "how to" on making screenshots of programs running on your PC. This will require only tools that you already have on your PC.

What is the Windows Clipboard?

Every time you copy, cut and paste in Windows, you are using a portion of the PC's memory called the clipboard. You may already know how to move text around by using the "Edit" "Copy" or "Edit" "Cut" and "Edit "Paste" features in most programs. You might also know about doing the the short-cut keys that do the same thing: CTRL + C is copy, CTRL + X is cut, and CTRL + V is paste. The question is, do you know how to copy images to the clipboard?

Copying images to the Clipboard

The key to the trick is called the "Print Screen" key. You might see it abbreviated in some way, but it's usually just to the right of the F12 key on most keyboards. There are two ways to use the Print Screen key. If you just reach over and hit the key once, it captures an image of everything on the computer's screen that you can see. It's storing this image in the Windows clipboard. The other method is holding down the "alt" key and then pressing the Print Screen key. This will capture an image of the single active window on your desktop.

Pasting images from the Clipboard

Now that we have an image in the Windows clipboard, how can we see it, and what can we do with it? In order to work with images, you have to use a program that is designed to handle them. There are thousands of programs that can work with images, but I'll only talk about the two accessory programs that you will always find on every Windows PC. The first is called "Paint" and the other one is called "Wordpad". You can find them by going clicking on the "Start" button, then going to "Programs" and then "Accessories". We will only be using Paint in this tutorial.

Paint is for images

That image is still waiting inside the Windows clipboard for you to do something. Open up Paint by finding it in the Start menus as I mentioned above. Once you have it open, use "Edit", "Paste", to dump the contents of the clipboard into Paint.

Saving the images using Paint

We will be done once we've saved this image. To save images in Paint, just use the "File" "Save As" menu and use the "Save As Type" pull down selector to save the file as "JPEG". This is the most common type of image file on the internet and you'll probably work with image files more than any other type. Now you just have to decide what to call your image and type it into the "File name" box and then click the "Save" button.

I forgot to mention that you should have navigated to the folder where you want to save it at. Most of the time, the "Save As" dialog box will open in your My Documents folder. I prefer to save all my files on the Desktop and then move them later, as I've just shown you above.

Final Notes

Using the Windows clipboard and Paint is going to be real handy when you need it. There are other tools out on the internet that will allow you to capture screen images and save them. Most of them are designed to make it much easier and faster than the methods I've just shown you above. If you are interested in finding some of them, just go to the Freeware Arena or the freeware section of Snapfiles.

That's all I've got to explain for this session. Just keep trying this out and you'll be an expert in no time at all. Just in case you need it, I've copied this entire tutorial into the accessory program called "Wordpad" and you can download it here. Wordpad can copy images and text all together in one shot, but that's a subject for another tutorial.

Have fun!

Clif


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