What's a screenshot and how do I make one? Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com. A Picture is worth a thousand words.
We've all heard it, we've all said it, and honestly, when it comes to design
describing what's on your PC, it's really true.
In fact, it's probably more than 1000 words.
It's something that I sometimes request people who are asking me questions
to submit with their questions so that I can actually see what's on their screen.
A screenshot is nothing more than a simple
picture of your screen and they're really easy to make.
Let me show you how and what some of the options are for making screenshots.
Here we are in Windows Eleven and I'm just going to throw something on the screen.
I'm not sure what.
We'll go ahead and take that Ask Leo.
And here's a Windows File Explorer that we're going to use in a minute.
A screenshot. Great.
I'm going to hit the Print Screen key.
You'll see that it notified me down here
in the corner that a screenshot was added to my OneDrive.
We'll talk about why. That's in OneDrive in a moment.
But if we now take a look at pictures and screenshots, there it is.
There is a picture of the desktop.
At the time I hit the print screen key.
You'll notice it's a PNG file and it's just a file.
A file that you can attach to a piece of email.
For example, if you were asking somebody a question, that's really handy.
That is the simplest and easiest way
to take a screenshot of your entire screen and automatically throws it into a file.
I'm going to go ahead and get rid of these
two that are here, this time with Edge as my active program.
I'm going to hit alt. Print screen.
In other words, I'm holding down the Alt key and typing the print Screen key again.
A screenshot was saved.
But take a look at it.
Double clicking on it here and we'll open
it with I'm going to use XN View MP because that's a better display for me.
You can see that it's a picture, but only of the current window.
Alt Print Screen will show you only
the current window, which is again, something that you may prefer.
If you're having a problem with a specific
program, then making sure that that program is
the current program by just clicking on it and bringing it to the foreground
and hitting Alt Print Screen will give you the screenshot of just that window.
Doesn't always apply to all situations.
Sometimes you really do want more than
just one window, but many times you do, all print screen is one way to do it.
So the simple ones print Screen for the entire screen and Alt Print Screen
for the current window and they all go to your Pictures folder.
Now, the reason it was mentioning Pictures
folder for me is because my pictures are actually in my OneDrive folder.
If I take a look at OneDrive here, you'll see that that's where the Pictures
folder is and that's where my Screenshot subfolder is.
If you're not using OneDrive, if you don't have OneDrive configured
to back up these folders, then you'll find them in your normal
Pictures folder, which is essentially the same thing here
under this PC Pictures and then Screenshots, and it'll be there.
So the other interesting way of making
screenshots is something called the Snipping Tool.
Now, I'm just going to search for Snip and there it is, snipping Tool app.
So we have lots of different options.
We have four different ways.
Rectangle Mode, window mode, full screen and Freeform.
Window mode is more or less the equivalent of Alt Print Screen.
Full screen mode is the more or less equivalent of just plain Print Screen.
The interesting one, to me anyway, is Rectangle mode.
So I'm going to start a Snip,
not by Windows Logo key plus Shift plus S, but rather by clicking on New.
You'll notice there's now a toolbar
at the top of the screen that allows us to change the Snip type before we make it.
I want a Rectangle, so that's fine.
To make a rectangular Snip, click and hold and drag, there's a rectangle.
That's the Rectangle I want to take a screenshot of as soon as I let go.
The screenshot has been saved and made available to me in the Snipping Tool.
Now, the Snipping Tool actually has some nice added features.
I can draw some lines, I can make some highlights, I can erase portions of it.
It's a very useful way to now annotate what I have here in my Snipping Tool.
The difference is that rather than saving
that screenshot somewhere, it brought it up in this little micro
editor in which you can make these kinds of changes.
And I encourage you to play around with the various things you can do.
But then you'll want to hit the Save icon or hit Control S to save it.
You can save it in your Pictures folder.
That looks to be the default.
But since this is a screenshot,
I'm going to go ahead and put it in my Screenshots folder.
Now if I close the Snipping Tool, go back to my Screenshots folder, there it is.
There's the rectangle that we had just made a picture of.
That is something that you can then attach
to an email when you're trying to describe what's on your screen.
So, Snipping Tool, or for something even more simple, the Print Screen key.
They're both useful and I encourage you to become familiar with at least one
of them, if not both, because it really will help you describe
things to other people, not necessarily even computer problems,
but all sorts of interesting things that may come across your screen.
For comments, for updates, for related links and more, visit askleo.com/2080.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.