How To Take a Screenshot And Get Your Problems Solved Faster!

So, let’s say you’re having a problem with your email, or if you’ve found a bug in your web­site. Your first instinct, nat­ur­ally, is to fire off an email to your trusty web-person. But wait! Before you hit send, make sure you’ve included as much detail as possible—what you were trying to do when the error happened, what sort of error mes­sage (if any) you got, what soft­ware you were using at the time, etc. This will help your trusty web-person track down the problem far, far more quickly.

An excel­lent way of sup­ple­menting this inform­a­tion is by sending along a screen­shot. I’ll often request this of cli­ents when I can’t rep­licate a reported bug—if you’ve sent one to begin with, I can be that much more effective.

Here’s how you do it.

On a PC:

• Make sure your screen is showing what you’d like it to.
• Find the “Print Screen” button on your key­board. It should be to the right, above the arrow keys and the “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys, and will prob­ably be marked “Prnt Scrn” or somesuch. If you use a laptop, it will prob­ably be up along the top, sharing key space with a func­tion key.
• Once loc­ated, press the button! (If it’s on a func­tion key, you’ll prob­ably need to hold down your func­tion key while you’re doing it.)
• Open up a graphics editing pro­gram. Pho­toshop, Paint Shop Pro, and Paint will all work equally effect­ively for this. Open a new doc­u­ment the size of your screen.
• Select “Edit » Paste” from your menu, or press Control-V. Your screen­shot will appear in your new document.
• Save this doc­u­ment (“File » Save” or Control-S) to your computer.
• Open up your email pro­gram, attach the file you just saved, and send away!

On a Mac:

• Open a Finder Window.
• Browse to “Applic­a­tions » Util­ities”. Launch Grab.app.
• Select “Cap­ture” from Grab’s menu. Select one of the options according to your pref­er­ences (“Screen” will do quite nicely!) or just hit Command+Z.
• Follow the on-screen instruc­tions. Your Mac will make a clickity-camera noise when it takes the screenshot.
• Back to Grab. It will con­tain a new doc­u­ment that is a pic­ture of your screen. Save it to your com­puter (“File » Save” or Command-S).
• Open up your mail pro­gram of choice, attach your saved file (it will be saved as a .tiff file, which is per­fect), and send to your happy web-person!

Tags: design, how-to, information, resources, screenshot, tutorial, websites