How to Print Screen

Have you even been online and had a page that you wanted to capture exactly as it is? Or maybe you have been given an assignment for work and they requested that you include a print screen. What prompted me to learn how to capture a screen shot was my desire to use them on blog posts to further explain a topic I was writing about. Whatever your motivation, it is good to know how to use the print screen function.

Instructions

1. Find the screen that you want. Insure that all of the information that you are trying to capture is showing on your screen. The print screen function does exactly that, print what is on the screen. It will not show material that you have to scroll down to see.

2. You may not have noticed it, but there is a print screen button on your keyboard. It probably says PrtScn. You can capture either the window that is open or you can capture everything on your screen. If you hit the keys Alt + PrtScn at the same time just the window will be copied. If you hit the PrtScn key alone it will copy the whole screen.

3. You won't see anything happen when you hit the print screen key, but something has happened. The screen was moved to your clipboard. You are now ready to paste it into any program that can handle graphics like Paint, Word, etc. To use it in a document you need to either go to the document you want to paste it into or open a new one. Once at the document hit the keys Ctl + V together to paste it into your document. Learning to use print screen was easy, wasn't it?

Tips & Warnings

• It is best to save application window print screen shots in GIF format.

• JPEG format tends to make writing blurry when used for screen shots of text.

• This method works for Windows XP. Vista has it's own snippet tool that does this.