I’ve been asked several times lately to recommend a good screen capture program. There are some great capture programs out there… But, most of those asking only needed the most basic of the functions. And luckily Windows already has the function built in.
That mysterious print screen button on your keyboard can now be of some use to you..
If you need to save an image of your entire desktop, simply hold the Control key {Ctrl} and press the Print screen key {PrtScn}. This will save an image of your entire desktop into the cut/paste buffer on your machine.
Next, open MSWord, MSPaint, or any graphics editor.
Create a new document, right-click and select “Paste” or hit “Ctrl-V” and the image will be inserted into the new document. You can then alter the size as you need it. The original image will be the actual size of the desktop.
ex. – Full Desktop.
Now, If you just need the active window… Say you have a webpage or error message… Then all you have to do now is Click once on the window you need to make it active and press and hold the {Alt} key with the {PrtScn} key. This will copy the active window into the Copy/Paste Buffer. Paste it into your program and size away!!
ex. – Active Window
NOW… You ask… What if I have “Dual Monitors” and I want the contents of both screens?? With dual monitors, Windows really considers them one desktop so… the first option will work here as well.
ex. – Dual monitor Desktop
There are a few free image capture utilities out there that have a little more functionality… But, we’ll talk about those next time!
© 2006 – 2009, Robert Owen. All rights reserved.
