How To: Capture & Save a Screen on your Computer
Our awesome and lately very talkative fans on Facebook ask great questions! Did you know we have a whole “How To” series to help you get the most of your freebie experience? You can find it on the blue bar above, under the logo.
Question:
How do I get a screen shot to use as confirmation when I get a freebie (or any time)?
Answer:
PC computers have a “Print Scrn” key on the keyboard. You can press that to “copy” your screen, and then paste it somewhere – Microsoft Word, Email, etc.
Windows 7 and 8 have a “Snipping Tool” that’s also really handy. You can snip any portion of the screen and save it as various file types (e.g., JPG). Find the Snipping Tool by clicking the Windows button on bottom left of screen, then go to All Programs, Accessories and find it in there. You can pin it to your Start Menu to find it easily next time you need it.
Mac users have a few more keys to press: Press Command+Shift+4 to get a selection tool to capture a section of screen, then paste into an email or other program. Wikihow has a great tutorial for all the various ways you can save portions of your screen on Mac OS X.
Or, use Awesome Screenshot on either PC or Mac, to save all or part of your screen as a file on your computer and/or as a web link you can share easily with friends!
If you want a screen shot or snip that’s something you can share with a web link, the easiest option is to use something called Awesome Screenshot. It’s available for Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers. It lets you capture the whole page or any portion, and draw on it with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text, plus there’s an easy one-click upload to share with a web link so it’s not just on your computer. It’s a free plugin for your web browser that adds a little icon to the top right, giving options to capture visible part of page, capture select areas of page, or capture entire page. (example shown below)
Once you capture, a new screen will open your screenshot in Awesome Screenshot, where you can draw or type on it.
Edit as needed, including cropping, drawing or typing on screen shot, then click DONE.
You’ll then be prompted to save on your computer as a file, or save online temporarily – and you’ll get a link to share. The screenshot will be saved online for about a month. From this screen you can copy the link, or share directly on Facebook, Twitter and others.
Thanks to fans Heidi and Bringon TheQ’s for the question!