It's meta: how to make classy enough screen shots to get a promotion

[pseydtonne]

I've written a lot of documentation in my life. Since I never know what tools an employer will offer me besides a Windows box of some shape and probably MicroSoft Office, I've become good at gathering renegade screen shots to illustrate my documents.

Since the 2008 Blogathon participants are probably flagging in the waning hours, I thought I would post something potentially helpful in sympathy. (Oh, and I pledged money already.) Here is how I make useful screen shots.

Please note that I am not an official tech writer, such as the majestic desert_born. She may object to this cowboy approach to screen shot collection. I'm just showing what has worked for me when I had to grind through a lot of screen shots while following a process. I hope I don't dishonor the profession with this disclosure of my approach.

The basics: use alt-printscrn to get a snapshot of your parent window, paste that into MS Paint, save as a PNG, crop in another application and save that. The details:

1. While you have the focus on the parent window (that is, the title bar of the window you want isn't grayed out), hold the 'alt' key and press the 'PrintScrn' key in the top right of the keyboard. This Windows built-in command will take a screen capture of that window. Note that just using 'PrintScrn' will give you a screen capture of the whole screen, which is usually more data than you need. Note also that you will get the entire desktop if you're in a Remote Desktop window, not just the child window inside the session.
   
   
2. Open MS Paint: "Start Menu -> Programs -> Accessories -> Paint". This is a very basic program but it's also guaranteed to be available even on a stripped-down Windows box and have the two commands you will need: paste the contents of the clipboard (where your screen capture is sitting) and save the file as something.
   
   
3. Paste the screen capture in the new window that pops up: ctrl-v.
   
   
4. Save somewhere as a PNG file: ctrl-s, then choose the last item in the drop-down menu at the bottom of the popup window. If you save it as a bitmap file (the default), it'll be huge and unwieldy. A JPEG (technically a JFIF) tends to be too compressed for this task.
   
   
5. Close Paint and reopen the new file in a basic photo editor. A typical install of MS Office will include Picture Manager, which may already be the default display application. This will do nicely. If you don't have that, you can download The Gimp for free and use it, although that's kind of like buying a gallon of ice cream when you only want a spoonful.
   
   
6. Crop the file to just the window you need. The desktop or any parent windows will only get in the way. In MS Office Picture Manager, you can press "alt, p, p" (those are three separate key strokes, not a chord) to get the Crop Tool.
   
   
7. Save the result, preferably as a new file. You'll notice this file is probably only 10 to 50 kilobytes, depending on the size of the window. This will be useful and can easily be pasted into a Word document or embedded in a web page.
   

There, wasn't that easy? You can use the key strokes and speed through a screen capture in less than a minute.

I hope this helps someone. Please let me know.

Comments

[proudlyfallen.livejournal.com]

You DO realize it's easy enough to use Paint to crop a screenshot, right? Takes slightly more co-ordination, but after pasting, simply select the area of the screenshot you want to save, move it to line up the top left corner with the top left corner of the canvas, click off the selection, and drag the canvas to size. There! No second program.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah.

Wait a minute -- why are you awake? Is it already horsy time?

[proudlyfallen.livejournal.com]

Yup. It's 9AM, and I have twenty minutes to goof off online and shove lots of half water, half fruit punch down my throat. (Nope, didn't drink enough water last night..... DEFINITELY didn't drink enough water last night.)

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

yep, that's the basics.

if you want to turn pro, buy HyperSnap for $35 and prepare to have your hair blown back by teh awesomeness of it.

Between Paint and Gimp

[(Anonymous)]

There's always Paint.NET, which is free and adds on to Paint. It's a good compromise between Paint and Gimp, and is the graphics editing program I use most.