Venkatarangan TNC

Screen Capture in Windows Vista

Many times when you technical documents or just presentation you will find useful wanting to capture some portions from the screen. Earlier in November 2004 I had written about using OneNote 2003 to do it and in October 2004 I had posted about using a freeware Zabgrab to it.

Though OneNote (esp. OneNote 2007) will work with Windows Vista, Zabgrab doesn't. So in my laptop with OneNote 2007 I don't have a problem, but when I am using a Vista machine without what to do?. Apple Mac 10.x have an easy to use Screen grab tool in-built in the system menu.

The good news is Windows Vista bundles (out of box) a great screen capture tool called "Snipping Tool". The tool helps you to Capture a portion of your screen so you can save, annotate, or share the image.

(Thanks to my colleague Murari Rajagopal for telling me about this useful applet)

You can find the Snipping Tool either via Start > Accessories > Snipping Tool or by simply typing Snip into any Search window. But it is easy to create a shortcut for it by using the path %SystemRoot%\system32\SnippingTool.exe. This path should work in all Windows Vista (32 bit) editions. It also has rudimentary painting (pen) tool. The tool allows you to copy the URL associated with a screen area and you can control this in your application through this API