Taking a Screenshot with the Microsoft Snipping Tool

Taking a Screenshot with the Microsoft Snipping Tool

Have you ever wanted to take a copy of your computer screen (or part of it)? Perhaps you want to email a picture of an error to your computer technician and find that it is easier to do that than describe in detail what is going on or maybe you just need to take a copy of something you´ve seen on a website for future reference. Well this is the tool to use and everyone who has Windows 10 has it already built into the operating system. The Microsoft snipping tool is a natty little thing that you can use to take pictures of your screen; here´s how you do it.

Click on the start button (the four squares at the bottom left of the screen) then just type snip and give it a few seconds and your system should offer you the “Snipping Tool”. Click on it and you will see the tool appear. Once you have the tool open you can choose the type of “snip” that you would like to take. There are 4 types of screen shot that you can take;

Full Screen – this one is the most obvious as it takes a copy of the whole screen.

Window Snip – this option will take a copy of a whole Window that you already have open (this could be a single program or an active window).

Rectangular Snip – here you can take a picture of any sized part of the screen as a rectangle.

Free-form Snip – finally this will allow you to take any shaped copy of something on your screen

sniping_tool

Once you have decided which type of snip you want, just move the mouse around and either click on the thing you want to snip, or if you have chosen the rectangular or free-form snip then click, hold and drag around the thing you want to snip. After you have selected the thing you want to snip then the tool will open up an exact copy of it.

Now you can add to the image by using either the highlighter tool or the pen tool. The highlighter allows you to to place a bright yellow mark over parts of your image, just like a highlighter pen and the pen tool comes in 3 different colours and allows you to write on top of your image or circle important parts of your picture. Finally there is also an eraser tool that allows you to remove pen or highlighter marks if you made them by mistake or have changed your mind about. To use this just click on the eraser icon and then click on the thing that you want to remove.

Once you’ve completed your changes, you can either save (click on the image of a floppy disk) or if you have an email program installed on your computer you can click on the envelope to email your snip.