Windows Vista Snipping Tool

Windous Vista Snipping Tool Makes Screen Capture easy

You probably knew that on Windows PC's you can use the PrtScrn key to copy whatever is on your screen to the Clipboard and then paste that image into another application like MS Paint.

Vista's Snipping Tool

With Windows Vista, you have a far more powerful tool available to capture a picture of your screen. It's called the Snipping Tool.
The Sniping tool is not available in Windows Vista Home Basic Edition. It comes with Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate Editions. However, there are many free screen capture tools for all versions of Windows if you have not upgraded to Windows Vista yet.
Once you have something on your screen that you want a picture of, click Start>All Programs>Accessories and then click Snipping Tool. You can also open the Snipping Tool from the Start Menu by typing Snipping in the Start Search box. However you choose to get there, whatever is on your screen will turn gray and the Snipping Tool box will appear with three options on it: New, Cancel and Options. New is pre-selected by default.
The first time you open the Snipping Tool you will see an option to "Display icon in the Quick Launch toolbar".

Vista's Snipping Tool Options

You might want to choose yes to this option. This will make the tool easier to get to when you want to use it in the future.

More About Vista's Snipping Tool

Once the program opens you can start right away dragging the screen with your mouse to choose the portion of your screen that you want to capture. If you want to capture the entire screen, don't drag your mouse at all. Just click the little arrow beside the New button and select "Full-screen Snip".

Vista's Snipping Tool

The program goes to the Mark-up page with your entire screen selected.

If you don't want to use the tools on the Mark-up page to draw, write or put highlighting on the page you've captured, just click File and save the capture the way you would any other file. Should you decide that you would rather capture less than the full screen after all, just click on the New button and start over.

The moment you start dragging the screen the Snipping Tool box jumps off the screen and out of your way. The area that you drag will be bordered with a red outline. This outline will even appear on your finished product. To get rid of the outline, click the Options button and uncheck "Show selection ink after snips are captured" at the bottom of the dialog box.

Click OK.If you want a boarder of a different color, click Options and click the arrow in the Ink color box and choose any color you like.

Once you have used your mouse to draw a rectangle around the section of the screen you want to capture and you've released your mouse button or you've told the program you want to capture the whole screen, another screen, called the Mark-up Window, appears with your selection in it. This screen will have seven tools on its toolbar. The first is New which allows you to start over, then a Save tool, a Copy tool that allows you to copy your selection to the ClipBoard and an E-mail tool. The last three tools allow you to write and draw on your work before you save it and selectively erase what you have added.

Vista's Snipping Tool

You draw and write using your mouse.There is even a Highlighter tool that allows you to highlight text in yellow. If you can't find this tool on the toolbar, click on Tools at the very top on the screen above the icons and click on it there to add it to the tools below.

Thanks For Visiting the Tech Pages

Questions? Comments? Did I get something wrong? Email me at sjh@scoroncocolo.com and I WILL get back to you.

Please add this page, or better yet my entire site, to your Favorites and keep checking back. This page is a work in progress. I intend to edit it and add to it from time to time. I've learned a lot about PageRank and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) while researching for this post. I intend to learn even more about Pagerank and SEO in the near future. And soon I'll be sharing some more insights on these subjects with you. In the meantime, if you have any ideas about how I could enhance the content of this page, please email me about it.

If you see anything in this post that needs to be corrected, email me about that, as well. I'll make the changes and make sure you get credit for spotting my mistakes. If you have any questions or comments about anything in this post or any other posts on the Tech Pages, email me at sjh@scoroncocolo.com and I will get back to you.

Don't forget to visit my Home Page at Scoroncocolo.com . And if that's how you got here in the first place, hit your Back button and look around. You can read my other Tech Pages posts by going to my home page and looking for them there. You can also look on the left side of this page and click on any of my Previous Posts.

To make this page and all of the other of my Tech Pages easy to find, type Ctrl + d to bookmark me and come back once a week or so and see what's new.