Perhaps still one of the most interesting keys on your keyboard is the PrtScn key. It can actually take a snapshot of your what's on your monitors screen and send it onto your clipboard.
OK, you want proof? |
- Left click on Start
- Press the PrtScn button on your keyboard.
- You should see your mouse cursor blink once. This is the clue that your snapshot has been taken.
- Open up MSPaint and in the tool bar under Edit, see if the Paste option is available & paste your image.
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What has happened so far is that when you hit your "PrtScn" key, an image of what was presently on your screen has been placed on what is called the "Clipboard". This is a hidden utility on your computer that works quietly in the background. It is an image-capturing program. We are using Paint in this tutorial to view what has been captured onto the clipboard but you can use any other program that allows input of images. Paint being one of the easier ones to use. When you use the paste command, it asks the clipboard to send the image to the Paint program workspace for you to view.
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Here Is A Little More Advanced Way
Of Using The PrtScn Key Option
The other way to do this is to use the Alt + PrtScn combination.
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*Note:
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Using your Alt key will shut down any context menu's you have open so if you wanted a snapshot of your open context menu for what ever reason, use the first example of Screen Capture Alt + PrtScn will as well, allow you to capture the current open window on your desktop and paste it into your Paint program. When you are taking a snapshot, the mouse cursor won't be shown in the picture.
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Beemer's Tip:
The file size of your snapshot is pretty big for either storage on your machine or for sending to a contact on the Net. You have to shrink the file. This can be achieved by cropping it and saving it to a different file type. The ICQ preference options panels that I talked about earlier will have a file size of around 450kb as a .bmp. If you have a scanner program or any other program that will allow you to save the file in a j-peg format, do it. A j-peg file can reduce your file size to about 35 Kb or smaller.
Another way to shrink the file size is to save the bitmap file as a .gif file. Save the bitmap image from Paint to your hard drive and open it with a program that allows you to change the format when you save it. I use Microsoft Power Point for this. Another smaller program but very handy one is called IrfanView . I use it for format conversions quite a lot. If you use MS Paint to save the image as a .gif you will loose colour information, as its colour filters are not very good.
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Here Is How To Use Power Point To Convert The .bmp
- Open a blank presentation in Power Point.
- In the text toolbar at the top of your screen, click on "Insert" and then "Picture" and "From file".
- Find the bitmap that you saved with Paint and double click on it to add it to Power Point. Click on "File" and "Save As". Save it back into the folder where you originally found the file and in the "File type" slot use the drop arrow to select .gif. Name the file the same as it was as a .bmp so you can find it easily.
- Remove the original large bitmap image from your hard drive as it is to big to store and unnecessary.
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