Screenshots

Quick reference

Screenshots and Clippings

Easily snap photos and screen clips from your active open programs and drop them into a Word document!       

When to Use

It is often required to describe a computer screen diaglog box, especially when writing materials to assist others. The Screenshot and Clippings allow you to easily snap and paste an existing screenshot from your computer programs currently open.

Instructions

Open a second Word document or a 2^nd Microsoft program, for example Excel, Outlook or PowerPoint. Maybe even an internet session.

1. Click Insert, Screenshot and observe the available screens. Click one and it will insert a “clip” of that screen into your document.

 

2. Click Insert, Screenshot and click SCREEN CLIPPING. 

• The Word window that you have open will minimize and show any second window on the screen. Observe how the screen looks faded, almost like a fog cover, and your mouse has changed to a black crossbar.

• Click and drag over a section of the ribbon and when you let go of the mouse button, that “clip” or “screenshot” will appear on your original document.

This is a useful tool to take screenshots of error messages if you need to email an IT person about a problem on your computer.  You would simply copy the error message screenshot and paste it into an email.

 

3. Use the CROP tool on the Picture Tools ribbon to remove portions of the clip.

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• 00:05 All right, I'm gonna show you how to use screen shots and screen clippings.
• 00:08 Sometimes we've got to write technical documents, and
• 00:12 we need a picture of that program in our document.
• 00:15 Sometimes we have an error message on the screen and the IT department just won't
• 00:19 believe it, so you'd like a screenshot of the error message.
• 00:21 Or screen clipping of it.
• 00:23 Well, here's how you do that.
• 00:24 It's all kind of built right in Microsoft Word.
• 00:27 First of all, before you start this exercise,
• 00:30 could you open up a second program?
• 00:31 I happen to have PowerPoint open behind this screen, so
• 00:35 that's the screen clipping and then screen shot I'm gonna take, so it won't let
• 00:39 you have a screenshot of the program you're working in.
• 00:41 It has to be maybe open a second Microsoft Word document and
• 00:44 have it sitting beside the one you're working.
• 00:47 Regardless, we're gonna go ahead and click on the insert ribbon.
• 00:50 Right over here, we have the option says screenshot and on tool tip.
• 00:53 Quickly add a snapshot at any window that's open on your desktop, and
• 00:57 when I hit that drop down arrow, it shows me all my available windows.
• 01:00 So I've got my file system open and I have PowerPoint open.
• 01:03 I'll go ahead and just click PowerPoint and watch what happens on my screen.
• 01:06 Click.
• 01:07 There it is, that fast.
• 01:08 I didn't have to use a second program to go get a picture of it,
• 01:11 I didn't have to be a graphics designer to do this.
• 01:13 It's got handles on it, so I can size this down if I want to.
• 01:17 It's all very convenient.
• 01:19 Imagine being able to do this and start building a technical document.
• 01:25 All right, the second scenario.
• 01:26 Here, click Insert.
• 01:27 Screenshot and get a screen clipping.
• 01:29 Have you ever had an error message come up and they just don't believe you?
• 01:33 Or you can't recite it back word for word?
• 01:36 And believe me, IT departments need those error messages word for word.
• 01:39 So let's give you an example of how to do this.
• 01:41 I'm gonna go right back to the Insert, I'm gonna go to Screenshot.
• 01:45 Take a look at the very bottom edge, screen clipping.
• 01:49 Now, what's gonna happen is I'm gonna click this, and my whole screen is gonna
• 01:53 go gray like there's a fog laying over the top of my screen.
• 01:56 There it is, just turned gray.
• 01:58 Now watch what happens here.
• 01:59 I'm gonna take a big screen clipping right here.
• 02:02 Of course I can resize it, I can put a frame on this, whatever you want.
• 02:06 You've got picture tools over here formatting,
• 02:08 you can do any of these things whenever you want to this.
• 02:11 But I'm going to copy that and paste it right down here.
• 02:15 Under the crop, 'cause I wanna show you what happens when you crop a picture.
• 02:19 Let's go ahead and click on this particular picture.
• 02:22 Back to my pictures tools, right over here we have crop.
• 02:25 When I click crop, it gets these thick black corners,
• 02:30 I'm simply going to crop this down to about this size, but then I decide,
• 02:34 wait a second, that's not showing at all what I want to show up in that section.
• 02:38 So, the picture didn't crop.
• 02:40 Just the shape around the picture cropped.
• 02:42 So, what I can do is I'm gonna activate my crop again, when the crop is activated,
• 02:49 watch what happens when I move my mouse in the center, click and drag.
• 02:52 I can decide which portion of that picture I want to show
• 02:56 in the cropped shape, all right?
• 02:58 Does that make sense?
• 02:59 So even though you crop a picture,
• 03:01 you can still determine which part of the picture to actually show.
• 03:05 Right, so I'm not resizing the whole picture down, I cropped it down, so
• 03:09 I can focus on just the certain part of it.
• 03:11 That's a great tip about cropping pictures.
• 03:13 All right, so we did the screenshot, the whole screen.
• 03:17 Did a screen clip for the portion of it, and
• 03:19 then we did a cropping of that to focus in on a certain section.
• 03:23 Please practice that, it's great to know these tips.

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