Take Screenshots Easily in Windows 11

Sometimes you need to take a screenshot of your Windows 11 desktop, or of an open app, so that you can send it to someone, or use it for a specific purpose. Windows 11 gives you three different and easy ways to do this.

The first is to press the Windows key + Print Screen (sometimes labelled PrtScrn) on your keyboard.  This takes a screenshot of the whole desktop and saves it as a picture file to your Pictures > Screenshots folder.

If you want to take a screenshot of a specific app or window, your can press the Windows Key + Alt + Print Screen but while this just captures the currently selected window, it instead saves the picture file to your Videos > Captures folder.  This is because it’s actually a function of the Xbox gaming features in Windows 11.

The third way is to use the Snipping Tool.  You can find this in the All Apps list in the Start Menu, or by searching for it from the Start Menu.  It has four different modes, Rectangle mode, where you can specify the size of an area to be captured when the screenshot is taken, Window mode, to capture a specific window, Full screen mode, to capture the whole desktop, and Free-form mode where you draw a line like a lasso to capture an area of the screen.

The Snipping tool also allows you to set a Delay for the screenshot of up to 10 seconds, which can be very useful for capturing things that might otherwise not be visible when the screenshot is taken.  Click the New button when you are ready to capture your screenshot.

One of the advantages of the Snipping Tool is that once a screenshot is taken you can edit it by drawing or writing on it, which can be useful if you want to annotate a screenshot to make notes on it for somebody else, or for a specific project.  The Snipping Tool also supports pen input on PCs that have one.

Learn how to find your way around Windows 11, make it easier to use, and how you can get more done with your PC with Mike Halsey’s book “Windows 11 Made Easy“, now on sale from Apress, Amazon, and all good book sellers.