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There will definitely be times when you need to “record” what is shown on the screen either for work, recommendation, or just simply as future reference, and send it to your friends for correspondence. We will look at just two simple methods which should be available in most systems today.

1. Capturing a Screenshot as a picture file

This is the most basic and handy method. First you have to locate the “Print Screen / Prt Sc” key on your keyboard. This key is present on all key boards, look for it. It may be the main key or a sub key represented in another color. If its the sub key, in order to activate this sub key, you will need to press and hold the “Fn” key then activate the sub key accordingly.

So assuming your “Print Screen” key is the main key, just make sure you’re at the screen which you want to capture and press the “Print Screen” key once. You won’t see any effect, but its been saved to your clipboard, same as what you do when you copy text with your cursor. Pressing the “Print Screen” key again will overwrite the last screenshot, and any other “Copy” task will overwrite last held. Just remember that the clipboard can only hold 1 item at a time.

Now you will need to find a way to display and save the screen capture from the clipboard to a picture file. For this task you can do it with Microsoft Paint. Go to “Start > All Programs > Accessories > Paint”.

- The Paint Interface.

- Just press “Ctrl” together with “V” on your keyboard and your screenshot will appear on the Paint Interface. If no edit is required, go to “File > Save as > Select type as Jpeg > Save”. You now have a screenshot in Jpeg format.

That’s it. That’s how we I got the above screenshot. If you need to do slight edit such as erasing or highlighting certain areas, you can open up the file in the Paint and use the tools on the left to do simple edit.

2. Capturing Screenshot as a PDF

Using this method may not produce a exact layout of what you see on the screen, and is more suited for capturing content rather than exact layout.

First download PDFCreator. Install it and follow through with all the default options. Once installed, it will add a new Printer, “PDFCreator” to your list of printers.

That’s it. Now whichever screen you want to save as a file and send it out, you can go to the print function and select to print with PDFCreator as your printer. It will output a pdf file of the screenshot.

Updates

230508 - I learned about the Jing Project via How-To-Geek, and its a free and extremely user friendly solution, definitely worth a try. Check out the full guide here.