Given that you’ve opened this thread, you probably know that pressing the “print screen” key (on Windows machines, at least), causes the current screen view to be placed onto your clipboard. So, for example, after you’ve pressed that key, you can ‘paste’ that image of your computer screen into a Word document (among other things, this is helpful for creating written documentation for various “how to’s”).
My question, then, is how one goes about saving the “print screen” image as a picture, pure and simple. In other words, it should not be embedded in a Word document nor part of a Power Point presentation. It should be a “free standing” picture, independent of any other program.
If you do this a lot, you might want to look at freeware Printkey2000. I use it at work all the time, and at home occasionally. It grabs the screenshot, then gives you a variety of options by way of buttons, such as saving, editing, sending straight to the printer, etc.
Also consider the excellent freeware image program Irfanview (for pasting into instead of MS Paint).
Under Mac OS X, just in case someone was wondering, Opt-Cmd-3 is the sequence for taking a screenshot (it will automatically create a pdf called ‘Picture1’ (or whatever #) on the Desktop), with one page per display.
The more-features version is an included utility called ‘Grab’ (by default in Applications->Utilities).
For the Mac one, did you mean Shift-Cmd-3 for the screenshot, panamajack? (Opt-Cmd-3 didn’t do anything on mine). I use Shift-Cmd-4 constantly; it selects the part of the screen you want a shot of (useful for capturing confirmation info from on-line orders).
