Here on the Simpletivity channel, I talk an awful lot about productivity tools, things such as Trello, maybe note apps such as Google Keep, and of course, email. It's something that we still can't get rid of here in 2018—ways in which we can be more productive and efficient with our communication.
But you might be surprised that one of the most frequently used tools in my arsenal isn't a web app at all. In fact, it's not even a project management tool.
It's something here that lives in my taskbar, and it's called Gadwin PrintScreen. Now today, we're talking about print screens in general, but I'm going to show you the one that I use, why I use it so frequently, and if you're not using some type of print screen resource or some type of print screen utility, why you should think about it—why you should consider it.
And no joke, I probably use this utility up to 10, 20, maybe 30 times in a given day. So how often are you on a particular website, or you might even be in a document on your computer, and you want to grab something?
Well, we know if we hit print screen on our computer, we can get a screen print of everything that we see. But in most cases, I just want a certain section—maybe I just want a quick print screen of this particular list.
Print Screen
Well, I use Gadwin PrintScreen. It allows me to hit the Print Screen button on my keyboard, just like you normally would, but then select the specific area that you're after.
And once I'm happy with what I have selected here, all I need to do is hit this check mark here, and it is copied—it's copied to the clipboard. I'm just going to open up Paint to use a simple example, and now I can paste it.
I can paste it there, I can paste it into an email, I can paste it into a document, wherever I like. I use this tool so frequently when I'm either grabbing something I need to share with someone else, or I want to import it or bring it into some other document.
I really use this a lot for my graphics. A lot of the thumbnails here on the Simpletivity YouTube channel start with a screen grab, with something as a print screen.
So let me show you some of the print screen options that you can use. Obviously, it's pretty simple to set up, right?
Print Screen Options
You hit print screen to grab that particular area. I can just click and drag right where the cursor is.
I can just click and drag over it, and if I want to redo it or if I want to scrap it, I can do so as well. If I don't want to hit the check mark, actually, I can just hit enter on my keyboard, which is sort of a nice alternative that I use quite frequently as well.
But let's see what other options we have with this print screen utility, some of the things that you may want to consider or think about. So, there are a few different things here.
You can see we can capture full screen, the window that you're in, or a rectangular area. It's this last one that I find so helpful and what I use most often because I can quickly just get a small portion of the screen.
But let's go look at some of the other options that it gives us because I may not be using all of these options, but you may find them helpful. So yes, I've got things to run at startup here.
A lot of these are more just sort of preferences here—a countdown. I've never thought this to be terribly helpful; I want to capture it immediately when I do so.
But I have a lot of these things turned off because I want it to be as less intrusive as possible. So, I don't want to see a widget anywhere on the screen.
I don't want that countdown timer, as I said. I don't want a notification message, and I certainly don't want a camera shutter sound, or I don't want anything audible to go along with it.
Now, our second option here has to do with hotkeys, and really the only one that I care about is the capture rectangular area. You can actually assign this to other hotkeys or shortcuts if you like.
I like it to be assigned to the typical or the standard print screen button on my keyboard, so that's what I use here. But I could reprogram that if I wanted to; I could choose another key or another combination of keys like you see above.
Now, when it comes to the image itself, this is probably most helpful if you want to capture the mouse cursor or not. Sometimes, if I need to show someone how to change a setting, maybe like this particular example, I want to show them which checkbox to click.
Maybe I would want to tick this off so that my cursor could be placed in that particular place on the screen and show them exactly where I want them to click. But in many cases, I don't want the cursor in the way.
I don't want to remember to have to, you know, move the cursor somewhere else, so I usually have this unchecked. We can resize the captured image, so by default, you can make it larger or smaller.
You could add a watermark if necessary. I believe in this case you can change what that watermark looks like, but I don't want a watermark.
I don't want a shadow, and no, I'm typically not printing this on a black-and-white printer or some other need to convert it into grayscale. But it might be helpful for you to know the number of different options that you have here.
And then lastly, we have post-capture options. So, a couple of things that can be helpful, but again, you'll see I have most of these things turned off.
Preview the captured image—I just want to be able to hit print screen, grab it, and then paste it immediately into the document or wherever I am placing that screen grab. Copy capture to the clipboard—this is pretty much a no-brainer because you need to get it somewhere else, right?
You want to be able to paste it or place it somewhere else. You can capture it to a designated folder, right?
You can send that via email, you can send that capture directly to the printer, and it looks like it does give you the opportunity to add some other custom actions as well. But for my needs, in most cases, all I want to do is hit print screen on my computer and say, you know what, I just want a screen grab of this.
I'm gonna hit checkmark, and then I can bring it somewhere else and just paste it immediately into that other file format, that other document. Like I said, many times it's an email that I'm pasting these images into.
Now, this video is not about recommending necessarily Gadwin PrintScreen. There are a lot of screen grab or screen capture tools available to you, both for PC users and for Mac users.
And recently, on my Samsung S9 phone, I've realized that they have a nice handy widget that I can use to do screen grabs on my mobile device as well. So I don't have to capture the entire screen; I can just do portions of it.
So I would recommend that you check out a screen grab tool. You might want to start with Gadwin, but there are other such tools, such as Snagit, and a number of other tools available to you.
So, if you're not already using one, I would recommend that you do so.
