Keyboard shortcut of the week: screen capture

If you wish to capture what you have on your screen as an image you can do so by pressing the Print Screen key (sometimes abbreviated to Prt Scr or similar) - on most keyboards this key will be found next to the F12 key, above the Insert key.

This will put an image of the screen into the 'Clipboard', which is the name for the "holding area" where windows keeps things that you have copied. You can then paste this image into any program that accepts pasted images, such as image editors or word processors.

Windows includes an image editor, called Paint, which is found in the 'Accessories' folder on the Start Menu program list. This application enables you to edit the screen image, should you wish to copy a section of it, or change its size, and save it as an image file.

Most word processors also include a few limited image manipulation features. In MS Word there is a toolbar that includes image manipulation tools, such as brightness and contrast adjustment, and a tool to crop the image. To show it, right-click on the image you wish to edit and click on 'Show Picture Toolbar'.

Posted in: Keyboard shortcut,Word Processing