How to Capture screenshot of Active window in Windows

How do you capture a screen shot of a Active window in Windows ? Have you ever used that button named as “Print screen” or “ PrntScr” on your windows Keyboard? or have you ever wondered just why its there since it seems to do nothing even if you press it ?

Well, actually it does do something when you press it. It copies an image of your windows active screen which is open at time you press it and saves that image in “windows clipboard” ready to get pasted on any graphic programs like windows paint program or even Photoshop. Capturing a screen shot of active window is very handy and helpful, specially for demonstration purposes or for any purpose you can think of.

Follow these simple steps, which will show you how to use that “PrntScr” Tab of your windows keyboard along with the Windows built in Image editor “Microsoft Paint” how to capture a screen shot of your active window, paste it and save it as an image file.

Here’s How you can do it:

• Open any Window that you would like to capture, than press the Print screen key on your keyboard, which may be labeled as (PrntScr)
• Open the Windows Image editing program “Microsoft Paint”. You can access it from “all programs –under “accessories”(you can use any image editing program)
•  Now click on Edit and than paste or you can press Ctrl+V on your windows keyboard. The captured image will be pasted. If prompted to enlarge image click on yes to see the full size of the image
• You can also use the crop tool to crop the image and resize it according to your choice.
• Next got to file menu and click on save as.
• Navigate to the folder where you would like to save the image
• Under the name field give a name to the image, choose type and click on the save button.
  That’s it, you have just captured a screen shot of your active Window and saved it too. 

SOME TIPS:

1. If you want to capture only the active screen and not the whole desktop screen hold down the Alt key and press the “PrntScr” key.

2. You can save the captured screen shots image as JPEG, GIF, BMP or PNG formats.

3. The term Windows Clipboard is referred to a temporary storage space in memory where the item is stored till it is transferred to a program by pasting it, than its removed from the memory. If you copy something else than the previous image is replaced by the new one. You can not manipulate the windows clipboard, its only used for copy paste.

Not satisfied ? than you may like to Read:

1. How to capture any part of your Desktop.
2. Top 3 Image viewer for Windows
3. How to hide the text from desktop icons in windows.

Posted By: Ben Jamir