Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #411 3/28/2018


Question: How do I make a screenshot or screen print?

Answer:

You will sometimes have a person ask you to do \a screenshot or screen print of what is on your computer screen. A screenshot or screen print (I am going to stay with screen print as word for rest of article, however both are same thing) is where you have made a copy of what is showing on your computer screen. These are sometimes helpful to someone at another location helping you with a problem to know what you are seeing or in my online classes I have students to do them to show me they did the work.

Screen prints can be done in two ways. The first is using a key on the keyboard and getting all of the screen or a window and the second is using the snipping tool which you can choose area you get print of. You could also get out your phone and literally take a picture of the screen with the built in camera however quality goes down hill.

The first way is the way that has been available to us since the early days of the computer. On your keyboard in the upper right corner is a key labeled prtscr or print screen or something like that. If you press the shift key with that key (same as doing an upper case letter) a copy of the screen will be put on the clipboard. You will not notice anything happen. However, now you can go in a document in your word processing program or your paint program or photo editing program or in your email message and when you do paste the screen print appears. To do the paste go to place you want the screen print and either press CTRL and v or in the program go to the edit menu and click paste or right click where you want it pasted and click paste. The print is now there.

The second way is to use the Snipping Tool that Microsoft added to recent versions of Windows. Click the start button in lower left of the screen and then find Windows Accessories (Windows 10 or in Windows 7 look in Accessories, then find Snipping tool and choose it. A small box will pop up with the snipping tool. Click New and then move the mouse to a corner of the area you want to do screen print of. Press and hold the shift key and move to the opposite diagonal corner. You will see it highlight the area and then it appears on a new snipping tool screen and is also on the clipboard. You can save it as a file in the snipping tool and use that way or you can paste it like using prtscr button If you have another item to snip after you have pasted or saved that one clip file, new in the snipping tool and you can do the next.

Remember only one thing can be on the clipboard at a time and anything on clipboard disappears when the machine is turned off.