|
Print Screen:
Print screen is a useful little feature
that allows you to take a quick snapshot of your monitor at a given
time. Almost every keyboard in use today has a key named print screen.
Look around your keyboard to see if you have one. Got it? OK, we can go
on from here. Don't have one? C'mon! Go out right now and buy you a new
keyboard. For goodness sake! They're only like $10. Throw that ancient
old keyboard out and step into the eighties (yes I know it is the new millennium,
but we had that key on our keyboards even back in the 80's.
OK, what this feature does is this. When you hit
the Print Screen key, it saves a copy (or a picture) of the screen onto
the "clipboard"
to be pasted into
an image program. So in order to use this feature, you will need to have
some sort of graphics program. If you don't have a program for editing
images, don't worry, we have you covered!
Every copy of Microsoft Windows comes with a copy of MS Paint or
Paintbrush. Open this program if it is the only image program you have
on your system. Otherwise, open whatever image editing software you plan
to use.
Once you have this open, go ahead and minimize
the programs window so we can see the desktop. For the sake of example,
let's take a screenshot of your desktop. With all windows closed or
minimized, go ahead and hit the Print Screen key on your
keyboard..... WOW! Did you see that? Wasn't that awesome? OK, I'm
kidding. Nothing happened. Or did it?
To find out, let's bring up your image program
window and either right click in the main window or workspace of that
image program and then choose PASTE. Or you can usually go to EDIT /
PASTE. You can even try the keyboard shortcut of holding the Ctrl button
and hitting the V button. This is the keyboard command for PASTE.
This should PASTE whatever is on your clipboard
into the program. Now you can edit this image and use it for whatever
you want.
To capture another image with Print Screen,
simply bring up whatever you want to capture and hit the Print Screen
key again. Keep in mind that the clipboard can only hold one image or
screen capture at a time.
And if you only want to capture an open window,
instead of the entire screen, you can hold the Ctrl key while you hit
Print Screen. This will capture only the selected window and nothing
else.
Go ahead, try awesome and useful tool out. Once
you know how to do it, you'll be surprised how often you can find a use
for this trick. Now, if they just had a key that would allow me to print
money..........
Back |