Take a Picture of What’s On your Screen

If you need assistance to solve a computer problem you can help the person helping you if you take a picture of your screen. In this way you can show them what the
problem looks like so they can understand it more
easily. You may also want to capture a picture of your screen
to record the information on it such as details of an online purchase.

When you take a picture of the screen the picture it is saved on the Windows Clipboard. This is an invisible and temporary storage location which stores only one item at a time. So you’ll want to take a picture of your screen then paste it somewhere that lets you save it permanently. You can paste it into an e-mail message so you can send it to someone or if you want to keep it for your own records you can use Paint to save it as a file.




Before you capture your screen make sure that what you want to take a picture of is on the screen in front of you. Your picture will be everything you see so, if desired, you can hide anything you don’t want to capture. If you’re trying to capture an error message don’t worry about rearranging the screen as you risk losing your view of the error message before you’ve captured it.





There are two key combinations you can use to take a screenshot and both use keys on the keyboard. Press the Print Screen key (often labelled Prt Scr) to take a picture of everything that is on the screen. To take a picture of the current window press Alt + Print Screen. When you do so, the capture is stored in the Windows Clipboard.





Open a program to save the capture in. To send the image via e-mail, launch Outlook and create a new message. Click in the body of the message, right click and choose Paste to paste the image on the Clipboard into your message. You can now complete the message and send it.





To save the screen picture in a file, click the Start button, type Paint and click on Microsoft Paint to launch it. Click the Home tab and click Paste to paste the screen capture into the document. Click the blue Paint button to the left of the Home tab, choose Save and then type a name for your file and save it to My Pictures or another location of your choice. Click Save to save the file and you can then exit Paint. A screen capture, once saved, is like any other picture or photo file on your disk and you can view it and print it just the same way as you would view or print a photo.