I have been playing a little bit more with Vista this weekend, and I found that there was a screenshot application included. I had never heard about it before, but it turns out to have been published already back in 2002 for Tablet PCs. I found it to be a real cool demo application, for showing some of the advantages that the Aero interface brings to the Windows platform. It is a way better option than the Print Screen method, as it can save you a few steps of work and offers more options than just capturing the screen or the active window. And better is that you don’t have to paste in the screenshot you have taken in your paint program or wordprocessor to be able to save it.

Snipping Tool

The tool allows you to of course make screenshots of the whole screen, but also in an easy “cut out” anything on the screen way. Perfect for support, when doing enduser documentation or answering support questions per email. The whole screen becomes an “inkable” surface that you can add comments to and do mark ups on, kind of like working in layers.

Snipping Tool

Snipping Tool gives the user 4 types of snips to choose from to get just what they want in a screenshot:

  1. Freeform snip
  2. Rectangular snip
  3. Window snip
  4. Fullscreen snip

These options allow much more flexibility to the user and allow for much more creative screenshots, just look at the Freeform snip:

Snippet Tool

Once you have captured a snip, there are a few nice features included in the Snipping Tool. Having done a lot of enduser documentation, the first thing that I looked for, was if there was a configurable pen tool which would let you draw on the captured screenshot. Snipping Tool lets you make arrows in various colors and line styles to point to the important parts of a screenshot, and it is now real easy to add comments directly on to the image. But even more useful is perhaps the yellow highlighter, that lets you highlight text and other areas in the captured image. Microsoft has also included an eraser that erases either pen or highlighting marks you have done on the screenshot.

When you are done editing the screenshot, Snipping Tool lets you save the captured image in various formats, as a single file HTML document (MHT), PNG, GIF or JPG. You can also send to an email recipient either embedded in the email, or as an attachment. I found a rather nice feature, when making a snip from a web page shown in Internet Explorer and passing it on as embedded in an email, the URL to the web page was than included on the bottom of the snip. When you embed snips to emails, you are of course creating a HTML-based email, so have in mind that a lot of people have disabled the possibility to view HTML-based emails for security reasons.

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