There are hundreds of reasons why you would want to show someone a quick snap-shot of what is on your screen. Learning to use print screen properly is quick, easy and gives you one more tool in your belt for effective communication.
One of the most common uses for print screen is grabbing a quick copy of an error on your screen to send to your support provider. Many times error occur that don’t stop your workflow and you just want to make a record of for future evaluation.
Back in the old days; hitting the Print Screen key (located on the far right of the top row of buttons) would immediately spool the information on the screen to the print queue and you would literally get a print out of what was on your screen!
Now a days, the average user just thinks this key serves no purpose or has never really thought about it.
In fact, when you hit print screen, the computer puts an image of the current screen (all screens if you have multiple monitors) into the clipboard as a bitmap image (.bmp) format.
Once the screen shot is in the clipboard you can then paste it into an email or even into a Word document or spreadsheet be select CTRL-V on your keyboard.
Alternately, you can save the screen shot as a file by selecting CTRL-S
One of the most frustrating things is getting a screen shot image across three monitors in a huge file with a small error window that you can barely make out even after expanding the image.
Here is a trick. If you only want a particular window in a screen shot then simply highlight that window and press ALT-PRINT SCREEN (the same ALT key you use for CTRL-ALT-DEL). This will cause print screen to grab ONLY the active window. This way, when you paste the image you get just that window and not your entire desktop.
