Use keyboard commands to create screenshots in Win10

John Stampfel, President, Brookdale Computer Users Group

I learn something new every day. To someone’s question “In Windows 7 (or 8 or 10), is there a simple way to press “print screen,” and then press just one more key (on the

keyboard) to have the image automatically stored in a .jpg, file with an auto-generated filename?”

I learned from the answer posted on Quora.com

by Pauli Vaara:

“Windows 10 has it built-in. Hold down the Windows key while pressing PrintScreen, and the screenshot will be stored in your user account’s Pictures > Screenshots folder in .png format, which keeps the original quality, unlike .jpg, which ‘mushes’ everything more or less.”

The modifiers (holding down ALT, or Shift, or Control) while doing this don’t seem to have the same effect as without the Windows key. They used to let you select a section of the screen or the active window. Holding down Windows-ALTPrtScrn will capture the active window only and save it in your user account’s Video/Captures folder as a .png.

I used to use Windows-Shift-S to bring up the, also built-in, Windows 10 snipping tool. That allows selecting the area to be snipped. That saves the snip to the clipboard. With notifications turned on, it allows you to click and edit and share, but it brings up the Photos app. Maybe that is sometimes useful. One can annotate, modify, save, or “share” (send to email.) Sharing here in Photos also includes, in Windows 10, the ability to share directly to “nearby” computers which also have the feature “share with nearby computers” turned on. The other computer must accept the share (like AirDrop on iPhones.)

Need a screenshot of something while in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint on Windows 10? That is now built into those programs. Check the Insert menu. So, more than one way to skin a cat.

Reproduced with permission from the August 2020 issue of BUG Bytes.