TIP: How to take a screen shot of something.

TIP: How to take a screen shot of something.

I am asked, as I am sure you can imagine, many questions all day relating to computer,IT and gadget things.  Most of the time people who have problems with their computers have an error message appear on the screen but they don’t have the time or means with which to make a note of the exact error message – and it’s the “exact” error message that really helps people like me find the answer to the problem, so here is a great tip that will allow you to take a copy of the whole screen or just the bit with the error in it.

To take a full screen shot – press and hold the CTRL key (bottom left or bottom right of the keyboard), with that key held down, press and release the “PRT SC” key (“IMP PANT” on Spanish keyboards).  This will seemingly do nothing, you don’t get a bleep or a flash of the screen or anything, but trust me, you have just copied the whole screen.  For the technical amongst you, this copy has been placed into the Windows Clipboard.  Now all you have to do is fire up any kind of word processor or graphics package (Microsoft Word for example or OpenOffice Writer if you don’t have Word) and then just hit the paste button (or hold CTRL and press V once) and your screen copy will be pasted.

To take a screen shot of the active item on the screen only – follow the instructions above but rather than pressing CTRL and “PRT SC” press ALT and “PRT SC” and this is take a copy of the active window, perhaps it will be an error message box on the screen that you want to send to your computer guy?  From there you just follow the same instructions and paste the item that you have copied into a word processor or graphics package and then you can send that file to whoever you want to see the screen shot as an attachment to an email.

Note: some computers (mainly laptops) require the function (fn) key to be pressed when accessing certain buttons, usually the colour of the fn key is the same as the colour for the function of the button.  So for example in some instances it is necessary to press fn+ctrl and the “PRT SC” key.