Using the Snipping Tool in Windows 7

The Snipping Tool is for capturing images of your desktop. Don’t underestimate the utility of a screen-capture program. If you ever have an IT guy say he can’t help you because he has never seen the error message, use the Snipping Tool to show him your evidence. Granted, you can’t always do this because your entire computer might be frozen, but it will come in handy.

You start the Snipping Tool by going to Start, Snipping Tool (or by choosing Start, All Programs, Accessories, Snipping Tool). You select the type of “snip” you want by clicking the down arrow next to the New button. Your options are

• Free-form Snip—Enables you to literally draw around something as if you were cutting it out with scissors. The results will still be rectangular in form, though.

• Rectangular Snip—Enables you to drag out a rectangular-shaped area to the size you want. Think of it as precropping an image. Otherwise, you’d have to capture the entire screen and then cut out what you want. This option eliminates the extra steps.

• Windows Snip—Enables you to click on a particular window to capture only that window, automatically cutting out the desktop image and anything else, even underlying windows.

• Full-screen Snip—Enables you to capture the whole screen in one go. Once captured, you can draw on or highlight sections of your images and then save them. Click the disk image in the toolbar to open the Save dialog box (or click File, Save). The default location is your Pictures library. You can save your images in the following file formats:

• PNG—The Portable Network Graphics file format is the newest and most accessible file format today. It was developed to replace the GIF file format, which, at the time, was owned by CompuServe. PNGs are generally larger but they can also store more complex amounts of data.

• GIF—The classic GIF file format is a very simple file format designed to make images as small as they possibly can be for quicker transfer over the network.

• JPG—Also known as JPEG, this file format was designed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group to offer photojournalists a file format that could retain a lot of data but could also be compressed for network deliveries to newspapers around the world. JPG offers a lot of options, including continuously variable compression.

• MHT—A Single File HTML format, which is proprietary to Microsoft and really has little use, especially as a file format for screen captures. I’d avoid this unless your intent is to confuse individuals attempting to view images on your computer.