Tech Tuesday: Screen Capturing

One trick that I use on an almost daily basis is screen capturing.

For the Mac users in the world there are a couple ways to capture -- aka take pictures of -- all or part of your screen.

If you're a menu-driven person, you may prefer to choose "Go > Utilities > Grab" to initiate the capture. Once Grab is launched, use the Capture drop-down to choose a particular selection, window, or your entire screen.

If you're a shortcut person like I am, you can use keystroke combinations to initiate the capture process:

• Take a picture of the whole screen........................Command - Shift - 3
• Take a picture of part of the screen.......................Command - Shift - 4, and drag the crosshair pointer to select area
• Take a picture of a particular window..................Command - Shift - 4, press space bar, move the camera to the chosen window, and click

Pictures generated in Grab are TIFF files by default, and shortcut pictures are PNG files. Both are compatible with most other applications and can be embedded, opened, and sent easily. You can change them to different file formats in Preview by doing a File > Save as, and changing the format.

I promise you that once you start using screen capturing, you'll find tons of uses for it.