How to use the Windows Snipping ToolBy Lawrence Abrams on January 10, 2007 | Last Updated: December 13, 2012 | Read 185,295 times.Table of Contents
The Snipping Tool is a program that is part of Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Window 8. Snipping Tool allows you to take selections of your windows or desktop and save them as snips, or screen shots, on your computer. In the past if you wanted a full featured screen shot program you needed to spend some money to purchase a commercial one. If you needed basic screen shot capability, past versions of Windows enabled you to take screen shots by pressing the the PrintScreen button to take a picture of your entire screen or Alt-Printscreen to take a screen shot of just the active window. This screen shot would be placed in your clipboard that you can then paste in another image program of your choice. What makes the Snipping Tool so attractive is that:
This guide will walk you through the steps necessary to use the Snipping Tool to save screen shots of your running programs, portions of other pictures, and your desktop as images on your computer. Please note, unless you have the Tablet PC Optional Components feature enabled in Windows Vista, the Snipping Tool will not be available on your computer. To enable this feature please follow the instructions in our Windows Vista Feature Guide. When you have enabled the feature, come back and follow the rest of these steps. The Snipping Tool is automatically installed in Windows 7 and Windows 8. Before we go into more detail on how to use the tool and it's options, I want to explain how the tool works. The Snipping Tool allows you to capture portions of your screen using four methods and then save these snips as a JPG, GIF, PNG, or MHT file. The capture methods that can be used to take snips are free-form, rectangular, window, and full-screen. We will go into more information about these different methods later in the tutorial. What is important to know, though, is that when you start the Snipping Tool, it automatically goes into capture mode using the last selection type that was selected. What this means is that while Snipping Tool is capture mode, you will not be able to use Windows normally unless you either cancel the capture by pressing the Capture button or by Alt-Tabbing out of the tool. Now that we understand this, lets move on to finding and starting the Snipping Tool. To start the Snipping Tool please follow these steps:
If you are running Windows 8, you can just search for Snipping Tool at the Windows 8 Start Screen. The snipping tool should now be started and you will see a screen similar to the one below.
When you start the Snipping Tool you can click on the Options button to set the preferences on how you want the program to operate. Below we have a table that explains what each of these options do and how they affect the snips, or screen shots, that you create. The options are broken up into Application and Selections groups. Application Options:
Selection Options:
My suggestion is to enable all the application options other than Include URL below snips (HTML only) and Show screen overlay when Snipping Tool is active. For the selection options I would disable the Show selection ink after snips are captured option for better looking snips. Now that we understand the options, lets learn about the different types of snips that can be taken.
Types of snips that can be taken. There are four different selection types that you can use to take a snip using the Snipping Tool. In order to change the type of of selection the Snipping Tool will use to create a snip you would click on the small down arrow menu next to the New button. This is shown by the arrow in the image below.
A description of each selection type and an example snip is shown below. Free-form Snip: This method allows you to draw a shape around your selection using a mouse or a stylus. Once the selection shape is drawn and you close the shape so there are no open sides, the snip will be created and shown to you. An example of a free-form snip is below. Notice how it is a circular snip because I drew a circular selection.
Rectangular Snip: This method simply allows you to create a rectangular selection around a portion of your screen and anything in that rectangle will be used to create the snip. An example of a rectangular snip is below.
Full-screen Snip: This method will capture the entire screen on your computer. An example of this type of snip is below.
Taking and savings snips with the Snipping Tool In this portion of the tutorial I will walk you through taking a rectangular snip. In my example, I will be using the picture of the babies that you we used previously, but any picture will work just as well. So pick a picture and let's get started! The first step is to open the picture we want to snip, and then start the the Snipping Tool as explained previously.
Once the program is opened we want to select the Rectangular Snip type by clicking on the down arrow next to the New button and selecting Rectangular Snip. This is shown in the image below.
Now that the snip is created, if you want to draw on the picture with your mouse or stylus you can click on the Tools menu and then select the Pen you would like to draw with. If you want to highlight certain parts of the picture you can click on the Tools menu and select Highlighter. Last, but not least, if you want to remove anything that you drew with the pen or highlighted, you can click on the Tools menu and select the Eraser to do so. Finally, when you are happy with how the snip will appear you can:
You have now finished making your first snip. Now start sending your snips to your friends and family or embed them in web sites like this! Now that you know how to create snips using the Windows Snipping Tool, there is nothing stopping you from making great looking screen shots of your pictures, your work, or even your desktop. As always, if you want to learn more about, or discuss with your peers, the various features available in Windows , then feel free to talk about it in our forums.  A Windows Vista feature is simply a set of programs or a particular capability of the operating system that can be enabled or disabled by an administrator. It is important to note that in Windows Vista, when you remove or disable a feature, you are not actually removing files from your hard drive, but rather just deactivating them. Therefore disabling a feature should not be used as a method of ...
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