How to Use the Windows Snipping Tool to Create Screenshots?

It is increasingly becoming a necessity these days for PC users to get quality screen shots, so that you can insert these real-time screen capture images to your documents or the blogs or the websites. Specifically if you are writing blogs with step-by-step instructions like me, this is even more important to have reasonably good screen capture software installed on your PC.

There are quite a few good screen capture software available in the market. The most widely used one of course is called “Snagit” that can do additional things other than screen capture like image editing, marking images with arrows, symbols and text, and also crate PDF files in one go. Snagit will definitely cost you money and at this moment if you don’t want to spend any money on this, Windows 7 has already provided you with a tool called “Snipping tool” by which you can also produce screen shots easily real quick.

How To Use The Snipping tool in Windows
To launch snipping tool, you need to go to the windows start menu first and then go to “all programs” and then to “accessories”. You will see the snipping tool there as shown in image 1 below.
Attachment 1754
Launch the snipping tool by clicking on it. The tool will be launched with the screen as shown in image 2 below.
Attachment 1755
Once you are ready to take the screen shot of a particular area of a screen displaying (active) right now, click on “new” as shown in the image above. Your mouse pointer will be transformed into a “+” sign. Using this + mouse pointer sign, draw a rectangle on the screen to select the area to be captured in the screenshot, and then let it go by taking your finger off the mouse.
This action will launch a new screen with the screenshot you have taken showing inside, as in image 3 below.
Attachment 1756
Now you just need to save this into a bitmap image format. To do that, go to the file menu on top left corner of the screen and chose “save as” from the menu options listed in the file menu. You can save the screenshot either in JPG, GIF or PNG formats. You may just go ahead with the default JPG format, give a file name to it and save it into a suitable folder.
This is the easiest way to do the screen capture for free with just few mouse clicks. And after saving the screenshots into an image file format, if you are an expert with any image editing software like Photoshop, CorelDraw or anything else, you can edit and enhance the screenshot you’ve just taken. You can insert arrow marks, texts, borders or anything else that you might find useful to serve your purpose.