Making Screen Captures

Use this study guide to learn how to make screen captures and then to test your knowledge.

One of the common ways to get illustrations into technical documents electronically is to make screen captures directly from your computer screen. For example, you may be developing a user guide for a software application and want readers to be able to see what it is in the user interface you want them to press, select, or fill.

Note: The following tutorial is applicable to versions of Microsoft Word up to but excluding Word 2007. If you have problems using Word 2007 for this tutorial, contact your instructor.

Set up the screen

When you capture a screen, you need to set it up rather carefully. Here are some considerations:

• First of all, get something on screen that you might want to capture. For example, select a software application you often use, and open it to an area that might require some illustration—for example, the dialog box for a macro editor.
• Use the window sizing handles to scroll and size the screen just the way you want it. Remember that a full-screen screen capture is probably larger than the page size of the document you are writing.
• Remember that most of what is showing on the screen will be captured: for example, the red squiggly underlines indicating something is misspelled, selected text boxes, and so on. Unless you want to show these things, get them off the area of the screen you want to capture.
  
  Note: To capture the mouse pointer and certain drop-down or pop-up elements, you need special screen-capture software such as SnagIt.
• Consider enlarging or reducing the text size in the capture area. If the body text is 14-point, that may be too big for a screen-captured image. If you have set the display properties to small (for example, 1024 by 768 pixels), you may want to change temporarily to a larger resolution for greater clarity of your screen captures. (If this is unfamiliar territory, in Windows, click Start > Settings > Control Panel > Display > Settings. Check the number in Screen Area.)

Setting up for screen captures. Imagine that you simply wanted to show readers how to change the color of text in Microsoft Word. The screen capture above is way too huge and messy for that. Notice all the red and green squiggly lines under things that Word thinks are misspelled or bad grammar. Notice the wasted white space above the title. All you really need is an image of the formatting bar on which the color-change icon (A) occurs.

Capture a computer screen

To capture the screen:

• On a Mac:
• In Windows: Press the Print Screen key on your keyboard—this captures what's displaying on the entire computer screen. Or you can press and hold the Alt key and press the Print Screen key—this captures the "active" window (the window in which your application is running).

Paste the screen capture

Once you've captured a screen, it is in memory on your computer and will stay there until you copy something else. You can now paste this captured image into a document or into a graphic or word-processing application and modify it. You can also position the screen capture you just pasted. However, these are complex tasks; we'll look at them later. For now, try this:

1. Open a word-processing application like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer, Corel WordPerfect, or Lotus Word Pro, and start a new document.
2. Press Enter several time to move down to the middle of the page.
3. To paste the screen capture:
   
   
   • On a Mac:
   • In Windows: In just about any application running in Windows, you can press Shift + Insert to insert whatever is in that special area of memory (called the Clipboard in Windows). Also Ctrl + V works in certain applications. When you insert the screen capture, notice it has "sizing handles" on all four corners and in the middle of each side. When you move the mouse pointer over one of these handles, notice that it changes to a two-way pointing arrow. Otherwise, the pointer is a four-way pointing arrow. Try clicking on and dragging these handles to see what happens.
4. As mentioned above, positioning graphics gets a bit complex. While the graphic is still selected, try moving it around. You can do this either with the mouse or, in some case, by pressing the arrow keys on your keyboard.
   
   If you cannot move the pasted imaged around in Microsoft Word, try this: with the image selected, click Text Wrapping > Top and Bottom. (These functions appear in different areas of the different versions of Word.)

You will probably want to crop (select a portion of) or size (reduce or enlarge) the image. These techniques are presented in a later unit in this course.

There are quite a number of screen-capture programs available as freeware and shareware on the World Wide Web. For example, you can go to shareware.com and search on screen capture. As of January 2001, there were over fifty "hits." Some of these applications have cropping, sizing, labelling, and file-conversion utilities. As you'll see, you typically have several more tasks to perform before a screen capture is ready for your text.

Test Your Knowledge

Okay! It's time to make sure you can get set up to make screen capture, make the screen capture, and then paste it into a document in your preferred word-processing software. If you've just been reading to this point, it's time now to try it out—see if you can create and paste a simple screen capture.

You'll get to cropping, sizing, positioning, labelling, and other editing techniques later in this course.

When you've successfully captured and pasted a screen image, send e-mail to your instructor confirming that. If you have problems, also contact your instructor by e-mail and explain the problem you are having.

Use the unit evaluation form to give your opinions on the effectiveness of the study materials and organization of this unit. (This evaluation is strictly optional, strictly voluntary.)

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