Is a Screenshot Some Kind of Flu Jab?

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From time to time we are asked to “take a screenshot and post it” No, there are no needles involved and it’s not some kind of medicine! Those of you who are laughing themselves silly now, please quieten down at the back! I know that laughter is the best medicine but there are some of you who didn’t get the joke, so, for their benefit, we’ll spend this lesson learning about Taking Screenshots! OK? Those of you who know this already can play about with the more advanced stuff, like editing and cropping and turning them upside down and inside out … whatever you like, so long as you do it quietly! Perhaps I should make it clear that the following instructions are for a Windows PC - a PC running some version of Windows. Fewer people have Apple Macs, and even fewer are using some kind of smart phone. What is a Screenshot and why is it useful? A screenshot is just a picture of the screen (or part of it) You don’t need a camera to take it (in fact, it’s best not to use one), your computer can do it all by itself. It is useful to take a screenshot when there is something showing on your screen which you need someone else to see before it disappears - an error message, for example, or a particularly annoying advert. How Do I Take a Screenshot and How Do I Save It? Look at your keyboard. Somewhere to the right of the top row of keys you should see a button marked PrtScn (there may be other cryptic things on it as well, like SysRq) PrtScn is short for Print Screen and it used to do just that - send a copy of whatever was on screen straight to the printer. The other key you’ll need is the Alt key, which is on the bottom row, usually to the left of the Space Bar. You will also need to know about the Paint program which is supplied with all versions of Windows and is a basic image editing program. It can be found by pressing the Start key, clicking Accessories and then on Paint. You can use any other image editing program if you are more familiar with them but Paint is free and always there. To take a screenshot of the particular window which is in focus (you may well have only one which takes up the whole of the screen), do the following: 1. Click somewhere on the active screen 2. Hold down the Alt key while pressing the Print Screen key (this makes a copy of the screen in the Clipboard, so nothing will appear to happen!) 3. Now click on the Start button or press the ‘Windows’ key, if you have one - it’s usually next to the Alt key and has the ‘four squares’ Windows logo on it. 4. Click on Accessories and then look for Paint and click on that. 5. When the Paint program opens, go to the Edit menu and select Paste. The image of the screen which you have just taken will appear. 6. To SAVE the image so that you can send it as an email attachment or upload it to a website, click on the File menu and choose Save As …. 7. Choose a folder to save the image in (or make a note of the default folder where it will go), type a meaningful name for your image and press Save. OK, guys, that’s the end of today’s lesson. I hope you enjoyed it! There are a number of other things which it’s useful to know, for example, how to save just a part of the screen (for example, only the image of an advert or of just the error message you needed to email and not the rest of the screen). It’s worth playing with the Paint program and finding out how to do that for yourself but if you are stuck, I can help you out in a comment. Please spend the rest of the lesson following the instructions here and let me know in a response how you got on, whether you found it simple, where you didn’t find the instructions clear and any other problems or questions you have. You could even try uploading your screenshot along with your response, if you like!