Using the Windows 7 Snipping Tool

One of the really cool things included in Windows 7 is the Snipping Tool. With this little gadget, you can capture any area of your computer screen and save it as a picture. You can then include in documents, webpages, Edline… you get the idea. The picture above was snipped from my task bar.

To start, find it by clicking on your Start Menu and searching for Snipping Tool.

Notice as you begin typing in the search box, windows tries to guess what you are looking for. Snipping Tool shows up under Programs even before I finished typing the word.

Click on Snipping Tool to start it.

You should see the tool’s pop-up on your screen and the screen itself appears grayed out. If ‘New’ does not look like a button that’s been depressed (as in the picture), click on it.

Once you click on New and the screen behind the pop-up looks transparent, you will note that you have a cross hair pointer. Simply left-click and drag over the area of the screen that you would like to capture.

Once you let up on the mouse button, a new window opens showing the area you just captured.

Notice that there are some tools across the top. You can write with a pen by clicking on the picture of the pen and choosing your color. To the right of the pen is the highlighter which allows you to highlight and annotate sections of your capture. There is also an eraser to undo your miss-steps. To the left is an envelope icon which will allow you to send the capture via email. Left of that is the icon to copy the picture to the clipboard and to the left of that is a disk icon so you can save the picture. Once you have made all your annotations and marks, it’s time to save.

You can save by clicking on the disk icon. Navigate to where you want to save it. It will save the picture as a PNG by default, but you can pull down the file type menu and choose another format. PNG, JPG, and GIF are all acceptable formats for use on the web such as Edline. Make sure you give it a descriptive name in the File Name field.

Now you can insert your picture in a Word document or upload it to Edline – anything you could do with any other graphic. Below you can see the annotated capture and the one without any annotations.

Have fun with this cool tool!