How To Capture Screenshots In Windows Without Any Special Software

In my last post you will notice that I had quite a few screenshots showing what Blogger looks like when you are creating your first blog and writing your first post.  I wanted to write a quick post that shows you how to capture images in Windows without any special screen capture software.  It's very easy to do.  If you want to capture the entire screen being displayed at any given moment just click the control key and the "Print Screen" key.  So press <ctrl><Print Screen> and it will copy the current screen to the Windows clipboard for you to paste.

Once you have copied the screenshot into memory (the clipboard) you will now need to paste it into something where you can save it.  If you have an image editing program you can open it up and paste your screen shot there.  I use Corel Paint Shop Pro for my image editing, so I will paste it there so that I can then edit and save it.  If you don't have any image editing software then do not worry.  Windows comes with a simple utility called "Paint" which most everyone has seen before.  To open "Paint" just click your Start button and go to Accessories and then click Paint.

Once the paint program has opened then click the Edit menu and Paste or you can just click CTRL-V and your screen shot will be pasted into the paint window.  Once saved you can then save your image to a file.  You can click File->Save As to save the image.  Make sure the file format is JPEG or PNG since both of these can be used with Blogger.  Save the screen image and remember where you saved it.

Now when you are in your Blogger blog account and writing a post you can click the image button as shown here circled in red:

After clicking the image button you can choose to upload images from your local machine.  Click the choose files button and then select the image that you saved on your computer.  Your image will then be uploaded and you can choose to add it to your post.  After the image has been added to your post you can click on the image and you will get additional options where you can change the size of the image, change alignment, etc.  

Another tip that you might find handy is when you are saving a screen shot in Windows you might not always want to save the entire screen.  Sometimes you might just want to save a single window being displayed.  It's easy to do this as well.  If you want to capture a screen shot of a single window then click the window you want to make it active.  Now instead of clicking CTRL-PRINTSCREEN you will want to click CTRL-ALT-PRINTSCREEN.  So that means click the CTRL key and while holding it down click the ALT key and while holding both of those down click the PRINTSCREEN key on your keyboard.  After doing that the image of the active window will be saved to the clipboard and you can go paste it into your favorite program to edit and/or save.

I hope this will be of benefit to you when saving screen shots in Windows.  If you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments below. In my next post I will begin discussing how to make money from your blogger blog.