Windows has always included a very rudimentary screen capture utility - the Print Screen key. Whenever you needed a screen shot, you had to press the Print Screen key to perform the capture, open an image program such as Paint, and then paste the image. This resulted in a capture of the entire screen. If you held the Alt key while pressing the Print Screen key, the resulting image was of the active window. You would then edit the image using the tools contained in Paint.
Beginning with Windows Vista Microsoft has included the Snipping Tool for screen captures, called ‘snips’ in this program. This blog post will detail the steps of using this free capture program. (These steps should work the same for either Vista or Windows 7.)
Click on the Start Orb, type snipping tool in the search box and then press the enter key.
The program's dialog box appears as shown in the next screen shot.
Clicking the drop-down arrow next to the New icon in the tool bar displays the four types of captures that you can take: Free-form, Rectangular, Window, and Full-screen. The default type is indicated with a bullet.
Changing the type of snip makes that type the default until you change it again.
Full-screen and Window are the functional equivalents of the two Print Screen key methods mentioned above. The previous images in this post are all examples of Rectangular snips.
A free-form snip lets you use the mouse to capture an irregular area of the screen, as seen in the following capture.
The Snipping Tool then displays the snip after you have completed the screen capture.
The toolbar mimics the menus (with the exception of Tools==>Options). The tools, going from left to right, start a new snip, save the snip as either a PNG, GIF, JPG, or MHT file, copy the snip to paste into another application, email the snip, the pen to annotate the snip, the highlighter, or the eraser. (The eraser only removes annotations added with the pen or highlighter tool.) The previous image illustrates an snip modified with the program's highlighting and pen tools.
You can change a few of the Snipping Tool's settings from the the Options dialog box.
This box is accessed via the Options tool shown in the second figure above, or by Tools==>Options from the menu. The third option, Include URL below snips (HTML only) works only if (a) you capture a web page from Internet Explorer and (b) you save the snip as an MHT file. When the fifth option Show screen overlay when Snipping Tool is active is on, the Snipping Tool turns the desktop gray while the snipped area is the normal color. This helps identifying exactly what you are capturing.
This tool is a vast improvement over the Print Screen method and will probably handle the screen capture requirements for 80% of computer users. If you require more features, you should look into a commercial program such as SnagIt.
Copyright 2010 - VBA Consultants Ltd
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