Welcome, this is pc-addicts.com here. Into our short tutorial it’s going to be a real short and it’s simple on using the snipping tool in Vista. Snipping tool is a really neat screenshot kind of grabberI think. I just read of a real quick paragraph here. “Screenshot-happy tech writers and bug reporters rejoice! One of the nicer utilities built into Windows Vista is the Snipping Tool. A screengrab application that blows the doors off Windows XP’s measly Alt-PrintScreen and Mac OS X’s Grab.
The Snipping tool can take full-screen; particular window, any rectangle or free form “snips” of your screen and open it in an editor. There you can highlights parts of the screent shorts and draw on it with free form pen of different colors, thickness and tip styles. For a quick look at the Snipping Tool, see some screenshots blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
So basically what it is and I’m going to switch over to my screen here just to kind give you guys to an idea. Just a minute, all right, basically, Snipping Tool is kind of hidden within Vista and I believe it’s only available on of a certain versions of this I don’t know if it’s available on whole version, I could be wrong I don’t have the whole version. I currently running the vista business and I did notice that work, it is at home last year. Okay, good thank you. And it works, I used Vista Ultimate and I don’t have it installed, so I have to install it and it’s actually under the tablet features and stuff.
So basically Snipping Tool, you go open programs, on accessories, going to Snipping Tool. Yeah, that’s one way to get in to it and if you take a lot of screenshot, you know, you don’t want to go that right. You of course make a short cut somewhere or what I’d like to do is I’d like to just hit the window button type, s-n-i or s-n-i-p and just hit enter and it comes up right away.
I’m not sure if you can see this part of it. In fact I may have to watch the screen whereas I’m doing these to make sure that you guys see here. Bear with me just a second guys. Okay! Again, I’m going to go ahead and open it up, I will test that out and knows that you guys can see it. If you can't, I just kind of walk you through it. Oh, yeah you can see it. What it does gives you great—I don’t know what you going to call it—a gray upper who catch your whole screen. Brings up this little Snipping Tool Window basically with the crosshairs, if you see the crosshair, you just drag, drag up the box that you want to snip.
So I’m going to snip that a little bit. Okay, let it go and opens up with its own little preview window, and your choices here are to save it, you can copy it or send it in an email. Normally, I just save it real quick. I just click save and you tell wherever you wanted to save, if the default as a jpeg which is nice. You know in MS paint you got to switch that. Otherwise you’ll pick is a bmp and just hit save and boom it save that little snipping tool.
Now another co-feature is this little pen. Right now, I have the blue pen selected, so what I can do is go, “Hey look at it”. I want to show you this part right here. Okay? You also got a highlighter. You can highlight some text, let’s highlight this part. You know the standard out. Whatever and how you want to do that. You can erase a lot of things that you made, you save it.
Now another cool thing with, I don’t want to save it. Let’s open it again, okay. Now before you actually draw out your little thing there, you can select the free form snip which is kind of cool. I don’t know how many people would use this but it gives you a little pair of scissors to work with. Let’s just say I want to snip out this a little right here. Okay! There it is. It’s snipped out the circle. Now you see that there’s a red border around it, that’s another setting that’s in there somewhere. I believe its right here in the options. You can tell it to have, you know, to use it or not use it all.
There’s a lot features or a lot other options in there but your can go through trimming for yourself but a couple of other things you could do with it is before you actually snip anything you can do a window snip. So let’s just say I want to do a whole snip of this one like the webcam Mac. Now we’ll do I’m going to use trimming. Just click and boom there it is. Bring it right there. It’s kind of like you Alt-Print screen then you can still draw anything that you want, maybe change the color of the pen, let’s do it again and use the red pen and go right there, you know? So I won’t save that one.
One more is the full screen snip. You can do full screen snip and there you go you can see my full screen. Okay? You snip the whole screen but I use my main setting that I use is the rectangular snip. Oh, I can just draw my rectangles real quick, you know. Boom and save it but this little feature comes in really, really handy. When I first found it I was pretty stoked that I found it. It saves a lot of time from doing a lot Alt-Printscreens about that. Yeah, exactly excellent what I mean it’s perfect for that, you know? It’s quick and simple. It sure bits that the Alt-Printscreen. Even though you know after doing that overtime, you get pretty good at it and pretty fast but it comes in real handy.
Let’s see! The very thing else with that, there is some options within it. I should have doing it as you can see, you go into the options, you got hide instruction text it only copy snips to clipboard, include URL below snips HTML only. You know I haven’t look at that. I’m thinking maybe if you snip and HTML page it might include the URL at the bottom. It might be something to try. Prompt saves snips before exiting. You know I have that selected. Display icon in the quicklaunch, toolbar, you could do that but for me it’s to just hit the window button, type SMI and hit enter, you know.
As long as you don’t have another program in there that uses SMI or the main was SMI, you know K or L or something before the P, display it show clean overlay when snipping tool is active. And as that gray overlay that you saw just basically because you’re in the snipping tool and you’re try to snip something out. But it’s a real smaller tool but manage it’s too fancy and a lot of you might actually use or have a favorite program out there that you use instead but you know, just to has it built in and why no use that and I’m not much but third party guy too much. I cannot ready use whatever window it has to offer just allowing up everything else. But there was the snipping tool.
Now it’s early in the morning and we have a few people on chat, is there anybody that has anything to add to that? Or have you guys tried it, have you guys not tried it? You guys not even have vista to not try it? You think it’s a cool a lot of feature? That it’s in all Vista’s that’s good. I wasn’t sure about that but for some reason I thought, I read somewhere else or somebody told me in the past the it’s only available on certain versions but Google is your friend. That’s right!
I will post a quick link to a quick little tutorial on how to use it. If anybody is interested its right there and you know what, good luck and get me if you guys are watching this from the recorded shows but it’s a long link. So basically just Google it but that’s a cool little one that shows you how to use and they’ll probably use the snipping tool to do it too.
So there you go. My first another show just kind of try one just see how it’s going to workout. Guys, don’t forget to visit pc-addicts.com. Today’s date is what is the date is? I don’t even know that it’s March 23rd.
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