How To Capture a Screen Shot of your Desktop or the Active Window in Windows

Have you ever pressed the PrtScn (print screen) key on your Windows keyboard and wondered why it was there since it never seemed to do anything? Well, it does do something! It copies an image of your screen onto the "clipboard," ready to paste into any graphics program. These steps show you how to use it along with Windows' standard image editor, Microsoft Paint, to save an image of your screen. You can also watch a video version of this tutorial.

Here's How:

Press the Print Screen key on your keyboard. It may be labeled [PrtScn].

Open an image editing program, such as Microsoft Paint.

Go to the Edit menu and choose Paste.

If prompted to enlarge the image, choose Yes.

Optional: Use your image editor's crop tool to crop out unnecessary portions of the screen shot.

Go to the File Menu and choose Save As.

Navigate to the folder where you want to save the image.

Type a file name for the image.

Select a file type.

Click the Save button.

Alternative

Capture-A-ScreenShot is a simple to use screen capture software utility that captures screenshots. With Capture-A-ScreenShot, you can easily capture the last active screen, full screen, or selected area.

Tips:

Hold the Alt key down while pressing Print Screen to capture only the active window.

Generally the GIF format works best when saving screen shots of application windows. The JPEG format usually makes screen shots (especially those with text) blurry, blotchy and discolored.

The Windows "Clipboard" is a term used to describe the temporary storage space in memory where an item is placed when you copy or cut. When you paste, the item is transferred to the program you're working in. If you copy something else, the old item is replaced with the new. You can't navigate to or manipulate the clipboard directly; it's only used for copy and paste operations.

If you have windows Vista, you can capture screen shots much more easily using the Snipping Tool included with Vista.