Screen Captures This tutorial describes how to capture what is on your computer screen to paste into a homework solution, PowerPoint presentation or other document.

Making a Screen Capture The Windows operating system (either Vista or XP) provides two means of capturing what appears on your screen. 1.You can capture the entire screen, or 2.You can capture just the active window.  If you have multiple applications running, the active window is the window that is in the foreground. That is to say, it is the window that is on top of all of the other windows.

Making a Screen Capture Pressing the “Print Screen” button will capture the entire screen to the clipboard. ◦ This button is in the upper right hand corner of your keyboard, next to the Scroll Lock button. Pressing the “Alt” and “Print Screen” buttons together will capture just the active window to the clipboard. In either case, the screen image has been saved to the clipboard and is now available for you to paste into another application.

Editing the Screen Capture Image Sometimes you may only want or need part of the screen image you have captured. A graphics program like Microsoft Paint (usually found under Accessories) can be used to crop the captured screen image. ◦ In Paint, use the Select tool (a rectangle with a dashed line around it). ◦ Draw a rectangle around the section of the image in which you are interested. ◦ Select Copy to capture that region of the image to the clipboard. ◦ This portion of the image is now available to paste into another application.

Paste the Image into Another Application The captured screen image is now ready for you to paste into Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint (perhaps to turn in as part of your homework assignment). ◦ To resize the image in Word or PowerPoint, select the lower right hand corner and drag the mouse to make the image larger or smaller. ◦ Dragging the corner when changing the image size keeps the aspect ratio of the image intact, insuring that the image changes size proportionally so the image does not get ‘stretched’ or ‘squashed’.