I hope this question isn’t too silly, because I’m new to this.

A friend was trying to help me but I was confused about what he was telling me. He asked me to make a screen shot, and when I asked how to do that he told me to use the Print Screen.

I can’t find the Print Screen in the programs, so what do I do?

(Originally posted July 2006)

Frank , , Australia

Heh heh….

You won’t find the ‘Print Screen’ in the programs because it is on the keyboard!

Check the specialised keys on your keyboard and you’ll find one which is marked “Print Screen” or perhaps “PrtScrn”.

Pressing that key takes a snapshot of the screen display and copies it to the Clipboard. (This all happens in the memory of the computer.) You can then open Paint or some other image editor, paste the clipboard contents into it, and save the image as a file. You may need to hold the Shift key down to make the PrintScreen key work, or you might perhaps even need to press a ‘Function lock’ key first to make it usable. The keypress combination depends upon what keyboard you have. Try this:

• Press the PrintScreen key.
• Open Paint, hold down the ‘Ctrl’ key and tap ‘V’ to paste the clipboard contents into it. (You may need to click ‘OK’ to enable Paint to accept the image.
• Didn’t work? Try it again, this time holding down the Shift key whilst you are pressing the PrintScreen key. If that doesn’t work try pressing you keyboard’s Function lock key and repeating the above procedures.
• When you’ve successfully pasted the image into Paint save the image to your hard drive, and you have a ‘Screenshot’ file. Ensure you save it to a suitable folder and give the file a suitable filename.

When you’ve successfully worked out the keypress combination for your keyboard, and how to take your Screenshot, try this trick:

• Open several programs and/or folders, to have a number of program windows displayed on screen.
• Hold down the ‘Alt’ key and then use your Screenshot keypress combination.
• Open Paint and paste the image into it as before. You’ll notice that only the topmost program or folder window is pasted in as an image. Using Alt with your keypress copies only the window which has ‘focus’ to the clipboard.

That latter technique helps you avoid the need to crop unnecessary sections from your screenshot image, if all you need to show somebody is the display from a specific program.

I hope that proves helpful to you.

(And don't forget that you can also paste directly into another application such as a new email. -Paul Zucker)

Cheers,

Terry O'Shanassy