There is an essential computer skill that too many people don’t know.

How to easily take and send a screenshot!

There a lots of times where I’d love to be able to see exactly what’s happening on a person’s computer screen. It’s the best way to diagnose a problem. Listening to a verbal description of a problem doesn’t usually work. There are too many little clues that can be missed.

That’s why, whenever possible, I’ll ask for a screenshot.

The go-to method for a lot of people is:

Hit the PrtSc button.

Paste the image into a Word document.

Email the Word document.

That’s an acceptable solution (and a lot of people can’t even do that), but it’s not ideal.

Windows

There are plenty of tools available for taking screenshots but my favorite is Greenshot (http://getgreenshot'org/).

It’s free and it turns taking a screenshot and saving it as an image file into a single step. As a bonus, it even saves the full path to the saved image to the clipboard.

OSX

The built-in screenshot taking functionality for OSX is much nicer than Windows. I’m sure there are 3rd-party tools out there but I’d bet you don’t need them most of the time.

Here are some keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots on OSX:

Command (⌘)-Shift-3 (Take a screenshot of the entire screen and save it as a file to the desktop.)

Command (⌘)-Shift-4 (Select a portion of the screen to take a screenshot of and save it as a file to the desktop)

Command (⌘)-Shift-4, then SPACE (Click on a window to take a screenshot of that window and save the screenshot as a file to the desktop)

So do yourself (and anyone who might be helping you troubleshoot) a favor and learn the best way to take a screenshot!