Printing What's On Screen

Ever had something on your computer screen and wished you could print it out?

Well, you can. There's a key on your keyboard called "print scrn" (or "print screen") which will do that for you. Usually it's just to the right of the F12 function key.

When you press the "print scrn" key, nothing seems to happen but, in reality, whatever is on the screen of your computer is immediately sent to the clipboard as a picture.

You can then open your favourite word processor (eg Works 4.5, Wordpad, or Word), open a document page, and paste the screen picture into your document (eg by using edit/paste).

But wait; there's more!

The picture you paste in this way behaves like any other picture in a document. You can move it around, and change its size by selecting it then grabbing one of its corners with the pointer/left mouse button and dragging the corner until you have the size you need.

But wait; there's even more!

Maybe you don't want to print everything on the screen but just the contents of a window appearing there. No problem!

Just click in the title bar of the window you want to print (to make it active), then hold down the Alt key whilst pressing the "print scrn" key.
Only the active window will be copied to the clipboard. (Alter the size of the window before copying it to the clipboard, so it shows what you want to see).

Happy Printing, John Selby.

First printed SNN Newsletter Nov-Dec 2000