Fancy Print Screen TricksYou may have read my earlier post, Capture Part of your Screen in Windows: Behold the Snipping Tool!. The Snipping Tool in Windows is very handy.

But, sometimes you just want a quick and easy way to grab a screenshot.

As I mentioned in my previous post, you can just press the PrtScn (print screen) button on your keyboard, and that will copy your entire screen (or all of your screens in a multi-monitor arrangement) onto your clipboard. Paste into your graphics editing program, and you’re done.

That’s nice, but there are two other keyboard shortcuts in Windows that make things even easier…

Grab a screenshot of only the selected window

This one is cool.

  1. Select the window you want to take a snapshot of, like say your web browser
  2. Hold down the Alt key
  3. Then press the PrtScn key.

Then paste into your graphics program. Ta-da! Instead of your whole desktop, you’ve got a “window grab”.

This technique is very handy when you just want to capture what you see in only 1 open program or window. Note that in Windows 10, the built-in Snipping Tool has been enhanced to allow you to do the same thing, but with a nice graphical interface.

Grab a screenshot of your whole desktop and save it automatically to your puter

This one is very cool – but it only works in Win 8 or above.

  1. Hold down the Win (Windows) key on your keyboard
  2. Then press the PrtScn key

This is exactly the same as the plain old PrtScn trick in that it will take a screenshot of whatever you see on your screen (or screens) in one giant image.

BUT, it also automatically saves the screenshot as a PNG file in your Pictures folder – in a new subfolder called Screenshots.

Pretty handy, eh?

Need help? Hire me!
Get Scottie Stuff!