Take Better Screen Shots in Office

Nice & easy one today, but useful none the less.

Screenshots are a useful way of sharing something on our screens, especially with the plethora of different systems that different parts of the business may use that you won’t all have access to.

We all know how to take a screen shot – and we all remember that euphoric feeling when we realized that Alt+Print Screen copies only the active window.

What hasn’t been so easy / obvious in the past was taken just a portion of the screen – other than taking the full window and the cropping it from within the application. This works ok, but takes a bit longer, and often results in lower-res images.

Well, there’s a better way to do this (certainly with working with Outlook, Excel, Work in Office 2010+ (maybe earlier versions too))

From your new email / word document, select ‘Insert’ from the Ribbon. There will be an option called ‘Screenshot’

You will be shown a preview of any open windows to quickly insert – same as doing [ALT]+[Print Screen]

What we want, is the option at the bottom stating ‘Screen Clipping‘

Clicking this will then take you to the last screen you had open prior to the file you’re working on – so if you were working on an Excel file, then go to your Work file to insert a screenshot, this option will jump back to the Excel File.

The screen will then grey out, and you’ll be able to drag a box over the portion of the screen you want

The clipping will then be inserted into the file. You only get one ‘go’ at getting your clipping right, but if it’s not right, just [Ctrl]+Z and do it again.

You also get a small time delay which allows you to hover over any menu items etc you want to include in your screen shot (such as the first image on this post).

The ease of getting screen shots like this is one of the reasons I’m using Word as my primary Blog Post application – makes it very quick & easy.