What's a Screen Shot, and how do I make one?

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Summary: A screen shot is an image of your entire computer screen, and it is fairly easy to capture this image.

A screen shot, or screen capture, is a way to "take a picture" of your computer screen.

Why?

Say you're trying to explain a computer problem to a technical friend of yours and you're trying to describe what you see on the screen: the dialogs, the buttons, the messages, whatever. You're not sure of the terms to use and your friend is having a difficult time understanding your description of what you see.

You know what they say: "A picture is worth a thousand words." And it can go a long way to eliminating miscommunication.

Let's take a picture of your screen and email it to your friend.

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Ever wonder what the PrtScn key is for? A long time ago it did what you might think. Push it, and your printer would print an image of whatever was on your screen. It was kinda cool.

But that's not what it does in Windows today.

When you press the PrtScn an image of your screen is placed on your clipboard. Now, rather than printing it, you can do something with it.

Like email it to a friend.

First we need to make a file out of it. After you've pressed PrtScn, fire up your favorite image editor or use the Paint program that comes with Windows by pressing Start, All Programs, Accessories and then Paint. Now in Paint (or your equivalent), hit Edit, Paste and you should now have a image of your screen within the image editing program.

Now save this image to a file. Typically that means File, Save As.... Give it a filename you'll remember. I'd also suggest selecting either a JPEG or PNG file format instead of the default bitmap; they're smaller in file size.

Hopefully you can see the value. You're presented with a complex situation or a huge, long error message that you don't want to re-type and just wish that you could show someone. Press PrtScn, paste it into your paint program, save it to disk, and email the picture it as an attachment.

A couple of additional notes:

• PrtScn takes a picture of the entire current screen.

• ALT+PrtScn takes a picture of the currently active window only.

• PrtScn does not work on blue screens. The Windows operating system provides the PrtScn functionality and if the operating system has crashed the function's not there.

Related:

• Ask Leo! - Can I avoid retyping error messages when I need to report them?

• Microsoft - How to Capture Screen Shots in Windows Using the Print Screen Key

Article 340 | Posted June 22, 2004