I've recently been asked by several clients how they can capture a screenshot
and then save it as a PDF.
Let's look at how to do this using the built-in features in Microsoft Windows
and Microsoft Office. Hi, I'm Dawn Bjork,
The Software Pro and a Microsoft Certified Trainer. In Windows,
there are two ways to be able to easily capture a screen.
One is using the snipping tool and the second is with keyboard shortcuts.
Let's say that I want to capture this list of files for an upcoming Excel
training class. I'll begin by going down to the taskbar.
From here I have Search. Your search might look a little different,
but we can simply click in here and begin typing snip.
Here I'll see the display options including the snipping tool.
Now that will launch and you might also see that the snipping tool will
eventually become Snip & Sketch with future updates of Microsoft Windows.
At this point though,
we'll continue with the snipping tool and I'll simply choose New.
So this is going to be a snip or screenshot of the active window.
When we select New,
the screen gets blurred and now look for your mouse, which is a crosshair.
Now click and hold and drag and outline exactly what you want to capture when
you release your mouse. This will then be added to the snipping tool.
From here you have several different options.
One might be that you simply want to save it,
so under the File menu you could save this using a variety of different graphic
formats.
That way it could be inserted into other programs or it could be an attachment
to an email. Another option is to copy it.
This would put the image into the clipboard so that you could paste it into an
email message or perhaps into a Word document and that's what I'll do at this
point. Additionally, take a little bit of a tour of the snipping tool.
For instance, we could change this so that it was a Free-form Snip,
so this means that you would actually be drawing to select exactly what you want
to capture.
If it will take a few seconds for you to set up the screen in a way that will
work for you, you can build in a delay here.
You have your Save and Copy options and additionally we have some options for
notations or annotating your screen capture.
Pen choices or the highlight perhaps.
These are the key files that I really want to highlight and make sure are
visible in that list and I'll go ahead and copy this again.
Next, I'll bring it into a Word document. As that was copied,
all I need to do is Paste and I'll do that with a keyboard shortcut CTRL+V for
Paste. This might be all we need to do, but as it's selected,
notice that we have the markers as we would with other images and I could move
to that and actually make it bigger.
So the screen capture fills the available space in that document.
If I had a landscape orientation,
then it could even be bigger and notice that this is still very high quality
even if I have it as a fairly large image.
And some examples of screenshots might be a portion of your screen,
a dialog box,
or maybe it's an error message you want to share with your IT department.
Let's look at the keyboard options. If I wanted to capture the entire screen,
the way to do this is to hit the Print Screen key,
and this will be abbreviated in different ways depending upon your keyboard,
whether it's a desktop or laptop, but that becomes one way. However,
you might like the snipping tool better so you can control exactly what that
area is. Now if it's a specific dialog box or window,
we have another approach. Let's say for instance,
I want to share some paragraph settings in Microsoft Word,
so first of all, I'll move into the paragraph dialog box in Word.
I can simply right-click and left-click on Paragraph and if these are settings
that I want to share with someone or I have other dialog boxes that I'd like to
share,
the keyboard shortcut for that is to press ALT and the Print Screen key.
Now let's see what happens here. I'll go ahead and paste that in.
And once again,
we can either do our keyboard shortcut CTRL + V or you could right-click and
choose your different paste options here.
So I'll go ahead and just paste that in.
And here is that dialog box without anything else on the screen.
So that keyboard shortcut was able to isolate exactly what I wanted in that
case. So that becomes a quick, easy way for us to do a screen capture.
And both of these options, whether it's a snipping tool, Snip & Sketch,
or the keyboard shortcuts, these are all built into Microsoft Windows.
Now let's take it a little bit further.
I want to be able to now capture this into a document or could be a PDF.
Now if it was just a document, I already have this,
I could save it and I'll go ahead and do that and then I could share it.
But if I do want this to actually be a PDF,
maybe to share it without assuming that someone else is working with Microsoft
Word, then the option in Word is,
I simply will go to File > Export.
Now in some earlier versions of Word, this will be found under Save & Send,
but here we have the built-in option to be able to create a PDF.
So we don't need to have Adobe Acrobat for this,
but this makes it much more shareable and viewable,
including preserving all that content.
So I'll simply choose that choice and save it to a working area.
Notice automatically, it's a .PDF and I will publish the file.
So I'll have the Word document, I'll have the PDF,
but I have a way to be able to create documentation for whatever the instances.
It could be for training, it could be to share with our IT support.
It could be to simply share information with an external party.
Now you've seen how to easily create screenshots and Windows and then save them
as a PDF document using Microsoft Office.
For and more tips on being productive with Windows and Office,
head to TheSoftwarePro.com/Tips.
If this training was helpful,
please like and comment on this video and subscribe to this channel.
This is Dawn Bjork The Software Pro. Thanks for watching.
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