How to Take a Screen Shot
Screen shots are useful in many ways. For example, if you receive an error message, you can take a screen shot and post the link when you post to the wordpress.com support forum or to the wordpress.org support forum. Alternatively you can send an exact replica of the error window our support staff, which makes communicating about the error simple. Also you can use a screen shot to show someone a Web page without sending them a link.
If you’re helping someone with a computer task or problem, and you can’t be right there with that person, you can use screen shots to illustrate your points through e-mail or instant messaging.
For Windows XP users
In Windows XP, you can easily take a screen shot. In Windows, you can copy text, an image, a file, or other types of information from one place to another.
When you a copy a file, it’s temporarily stored on the Windows clipboard.
When you’re ready, you can paste (put) the text, image, or file into another Windows program, like Microsoft Word, Paint, or an email.
Just press the Print Screen key on your keyboard, and the entire screen will be copied to your clipboard.
To copy only the active window to your clipboard, press ALT+Print Screen simultaneously.
Now, you just need to paste the screen shot into another program. To save the screen shot, open Paint, press CTRL+V simultaneously to paste the screen shot, and save the file.
Microsoft Paint isn’t the only program that you can paste screen shots into. Some others programs you can paste screen shots into include:
- Microsoft Word and Powerpoint
- Microsoft Outlook
- Other graphics software like Photoshop, etc.
Note: The only times you can’t take a screen shot are before you log on to your computer and when you are playing a video in Microsoft Windows Media Player.
For Mac OSX users
- cmd+shift+3 – Will take a screenshot of your whole desktop
- cmd+shift+4 – Will take a screenshot of the area you select only
Using the above options will automatically save the image to your desktop, to put the contents on your clipboard, hold down Control as well. If the above options are not feasible for you, you can also use the “Grab Application”, located in your Utilities folder.
For Ubuntu GNU/Linux users
- Pressing Alt-PrintScreen grabs the frontmost window, while pressing PrintScreen by itself grabs the entire desktop image.
- You’ll be presented with a SaveAs dialog to save the PNG image.
- If you want to take an image of the mouse doing something, like selecting a menu item, you’ll need to take a delayed screenshot. You do this by issuing the command [coming soon].
My Operating System is not listed here. What do I do?If you do not see your operating system listed, you can visit http://google.com and search for instructions on how to take a screenshot using the operating system that you do have.
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Hi there,
I got the trackback. Thank you. :)
hi tt, i sent you a pingback to this post from one of my posts. do you think it got caught by akismet?
Hitting the print screen key (or combo of keys, I have to use Fn-PrtSc on my laptop) will do the same thing in KDE for Linux (Kubuntu, Fedora with KDE, etc). Ubuntu is Gnome.
I was pleasantly surprised by this. I thought I was going to have to jump through huge hoops to take a screen shot in Linux.
And at least in KDE, to get that delayed screen shot, you have to change “Capture Mode” to “Window Under the Cursor” or “Full Screen” or “Section of Window” and then you can set the delay. I can provide screen shots if you’d like :) There might also be a CLI incantation to take a delayed screen shots. I can ask a friend if you’d like. You have my email.
Is there any ap out there that allows you to print screen straight to a pre-set up blog such as wordpress?
The print scree function is simply one of capturing an image of what’s on the screen. Once it has been captured you will need to upload the image, because unless and until it’s uploaded into the wordpress.com servers and appearing in your Media Library it cannot be displayed.