I was speaking with a client this week as she was trying to explain to me the problem she was seeing on her computer monitor. I asked her if she could send me a screenshot, but she wasn’t sure how. I tend to take for granted the little things I do on a daily basis and thought other people might really want to know how to do this. It is really simple and could save you from trying to explain something across the phone when others cannot see the same thing.
There are many reasons to send a screenshot to someone, one is for those nasty little error message you get when your computer or software program isn’t cooperating or something is wrong with your Web site. Make a screenshot to send to your computer technician or Webmaster and they will be able to see exactly what is wrong. Another reason I use screenshots is to document steps for future reference or to even send step by step instructions to a client.
Make a screenshot
With this shortcut, whatever is viewable on your computer screen is what will be captured. Don’t worry if there are things on the screen that you don’t want as you can crop them out later. Just simply press the Print Screen button on your keyboard; typically it is located on the top row next to the F12 key. Once you’ve pressed it, it has basically copied your screen. You can now open Microsoft Word and paste by holding down the Ctrl button and pressing the ‘V’ key (Ctrl+V). You can also open your e-mail client like Outlook, create a New Message, place your cursor in the body of the message and again paste, Ctrl+V, to send via email.
If you paste it into Word you select the image and use the Crop button on the Picture toolbar to crop out anything surrounding what you don’t want to see. You can also resize the graphic by selecting it and click drag one of the four corners to make it larger or smaller. A tip to use with resizing is to hold the Shift key down while dragging to create a perfect proportion graphic so it doesn’t get distorted.
Make a screen clipping
If you have Microsoft OneNote, a terrific software program I highly recommend, you can also create a screen clipping and send it via email. Open the Web site, page, graphic or whatever it is you want to clip. In your taskbar, right click on the MS OneNote icon and select Create Screen Clipping. This command will gray out your screen a little. Click and drag around the selected item and when you release the mouse button, your screen clipping will be saved in your MS OneNote program that you can use to email or keep for yourself for future reference.
