You can capture a screenshot of almost anything that appears on your computer by using any of the following methods in Windows:

There is a great free tool called Greenshot that works with the Print Screen button. It allows you to capture any part of the screen you want. Greenshot includes extra features like:

  • Sending your screenshot to the clipboard, a printer, your email application, Powerpoint, Word, Excel and upload directly to Confluence or Dropbox.
  • Opening the image in the Greenshot image editor where you can annotate the image with arrows, shapes, lines and text as well as apply any of several special effects.
  • Includes many advanced features like cropping, automatically saving, capturing of the mouse pointer, support for plugins and much more. You can even use it to edit images from other sources.

Alternatively, if you have Word 2010 or later, you will find a Screenshot tool on Word's Insert tab. It has options to capture any window or just a screen clipping (part of the screen) but has limited annotation abilities and will only paste the image into the current Word document.

If you would rather not install anything on your computer, you can always use the Print Screen key (sometime written as PrtSc) on your computer keyboard to capture the whole screen to your clipboard. You can then paste it into any application like Paint. Tip: Use ALT-Printscreen to capture only the currently active window.

Finally, one of the best professional tools for capturing screenshots is SnagIt. This polished application does most of what Greeshot does and more. For example, you can also use it to capture video of your desktop including naration to create screencasts.

Tip: Resize your application before taking a screenshot to capture a smaller if the whole desktop is not required.

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