Capturing a Screen

There may be times when you need to include a screen shot within your Word document. The easiest way to do this is as follows:

1. Set up your screen to look the way you want it to.
2. Press the PrintScreen key. This copies the whole screen to the Clipboard.
3. Position the insertion point in the document where you want the screen capture inserted.
4. Press Ctrl+V to paste the contents of the Clipboard.

This action results in the entire screen being pasted in your document. If you wanted to only copy and paste a single dialog box or the active window, simply use Alt+PrintScreen in step 2.

If either of these methods still does not fit your needs (for instance, you want to include only a small part of the screen), you can use the following:

1. Set up your screen to look the way you want it to.
2. Press the PrintScreen key. This copies the screen to the Clipboard.
3. Start your favorite graphics editing program and maximize the screen.
4. Press Ctrl+V to paste the contents of the Clipboard into the graphics program.
5. Use the editing tools in the graphics program to change the image as desired.
6. Use the editing tools to crop the image so that it contains only the portion you want within Word.
7. Select the entire image in the graphics program and press Ctrl+C to copy it to the Clipboard.
8. Start Word (if it is not already started) and position the insertion point where you want the image inserted.
9. Press Ctrl+V to paste the contents of the Clipboard.

You should note that instead of pressing Ctrl+V to paste an image into Word, you can also use the Paste Special option from the Paste control in the Home tab, Clipboard group. This option gives you greater control over what image file format is used to insert the image in your document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8697) applies to Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Capturing a Screen.