Capture Part of your Screen in Windows: Behold the Snipping Tool!

Snipping ToolLet’s say you need to capture all or part of your puter’s screen. You’d like to grab a quick image of your browser window, or maybe you want to capture a frame from a video playing on your puter. Maybe you want to save an image from a web page, but they’ve disabled the right-click menu.

There are lots of ways to do this with fancy software. There are also much, much easier ways that you may not know about.

The first is the “PrintScrn” trick.

Press the Print Screen key on your keyboard (usually to the right of the F12 key, and usually abbreviated as PrtScrn or some other such thing). PrintScrn will copy your entire desktop – or both desktops if you have multiple monitors – onto the clipboard. On some keyboards, you’ll need to hold down the Shift key, and then press PrtScrn.

All that’s left is to paste the captured image into Paint, Paint.Net, Photoshop Elements or whatever, and save it as an image.

Okay, but that’s kind of involved… And there is a much easier way!

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