Print Screen Capture an Image of Your Computer Screen
Print Screen Capture an Image of Your Computer Screen
Visuals are often better descriptions than words. Print Screen is a wonderfully amazing tool that will make your life a lot easier as a computer user. With todays technology, you can capture an image of your entire monitor screen, you can "snip" a portion of an image to go along with verbiage, you can explain a computer issue by sharing a capture of a pop-up, and much more!
Every keyboard looks a little different. Print Screen buttons usually read "Print" or an abbreviated description such as "PrtScn".
So say something happens on your screen and an error window pops up, for example. You can hit the Print Screen button and the computer will save a copy of your screen to your computers clipboard memory. You will not see anything at this stage, because it is all happening in the background memory of your computer. Because it was the last item saved to the memory, you can move to a document window (Word, PowerPoint, etc.) or an email window, right-click and select "Paste", and the image will appear. (The easiest way to paste is to use your keyboard by holding down "Ctrl" followed by "V".)
"Print Screen" captures everything on the desktop screen, even the little icons on the bottom! Thats cool, but you dont need all that stuff in the background in most cases... maybe you just need to capture one window or pop-up. By holding down the "Alt" key followed by the "Print Screen" key, you will capture the current, active or most-forward window (click on the window you want to capture an image of to bring it to the front first, then hit "Alt-PrtScn").
Finally, if you only need to capture part of an image, Windows 7 has a super cool tool called "Snipping Tool". Opening this tool/program will allow you to draw a window with your cursor around the area you want to capture in an image. It allows the user to copy just the logo form the web page, rather than capturing an image of the entire browser window. This tool is great when you are unable to copy and paste an image.
Capturing a snapshot of your computer desktop can be useful for documenting a process, capturing the current state of data in a program (perhaps to an error message to a technician to aid in the process of troubleshooting a problem.
When snipping or copying images, please remember to respect copyrights. Never use a found image unless you have written permission from the owner.
