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Tip: How to share with others what you are seeing on your monitor – A Print Screen!

As the old cliche’ says, a picture is worth a thousand words. Have you tried explaining a problem you are having online in words and just can’t seem to communicate the problem or issue to others on the other side of an email or in a Support Ticket setting?

Well don’t feel alone. What you want to use is the Print Screen capability on your Windows PC or Mac PC, (yes a MAC is a PC “Personal Computer”).  providing screen shots of whats on your monitor to those that are trying to help you can do wonders in getting a problem resolved or just sharing cool stuff with others.

If using a Windows PC you could use the “Prt Scr” button (some key boards the print screen button will show as “PrtSc” or actually it might be spelled out as “Print Screen” in this article we will use “Prt Scr” because that is what it is on my PC) and capture your entire monitor, or use “alt” + “Prt Scr” and only capture the item you have high lighted like a web browser for instance.

To capture the entire monitor……

• Press your Prt Scr button and your image is stored on the Windows Clip board and then simply paste into a word document program, a image editor of choice.

To capture a portion of a screen……

• Make the web browser, or or item on your screen active (just by selecting it) click on the “alt” + “Prt Scr” at the same time and presto, its done. Now just paste the image off the clip board into a word document or image editor of choice.

To Capture a screen with the Mac using Mac OS X  system here is what you will need to do:

• Switch to the screen you wish to do a screen capture of
• Now, hold down Apple key ⌘ + Shift + 3 and release all (Why did they make it harder on a MAC?)
• Using your mouse, click on the screen
• Now you are done. (Yeah!!) You will see a graphical picture file in your desktop. Which is the screen capture picture!

Now to capture only a portion of your screen…..do this…….

• Switch to the screen you wish to do a screen capture of
• Hold down Apple key ⌘ + Shift + 4 and release all key (feel like your playing “Twister”with your fingers?)
• Your mouse cursor will change to “+“
• Now just drag your mouse to select the portion of your screen you wish to capture.
• Now you are done. (Wahoo!!) you will see a picture file in your desktop. That’s the screen capture picture!

BUT WAIT!………………

There really has to be a better way of doing this that is more user friendly and provides you more options, and the good news, there is!

I use a Screen Capture Tool Called “Snagit!” Its a wonderful tool to capture images on your monitor and use to share in email, in Support Tickets, on your web site. In a matter of less than 30 seconds I captured the www.Snagit.com home page and shrunk it down and pasted it in this blog.

Screen Shot Captured using Snagit 10

Snagit is a pretty cool tool and will really make your life easier sharing with others. The price of this FANTASTIC software is $49.95 as of the day of the posting of this article. Its a great price compared to other over priced progams. There is also a Free 30 day Trail of Snagit to allow you time to give it a wirl if you like.

But if you do not have the funds to spare and would like to have the software working longer than a 30 day trail, the good people over at TechSmith, the creators of Snagit, have a similar FREE version both for you Mac enthusiasts and Windows users called Jing.  While not as robust as Snagit, you can’t beat the price! FREE! Head right over to Download Jing to pick up your MAC or Windows version. And it will open up a whole new world of being to be able to share graphics.