Screen capture software allows you capture part or all of what your computer screen is displaying and you can then use that captured image to illustrate what you are writing about. To see how I used it in a recent article that I published here on Factoidz take a look at my article on “How to Create a Fold-Up Photo Booklet Using PagePlus http://factoidz.com/how-to-create-a-fold-up-photo-booklet-using-pageplus/.
Most screen capture programs are so easy to use that you can master them in five minutes or less. Best of all, there’s an abundance of screen capture programs available as downloadable freeware. Use them as often as you want, for as long as you want without ever paying a single penny. They are available PCs as well as Apple Macintosh computers. They are available for most operating systems. Google “Screen capture freeware” and you will come up with thousands of hits to choose from. I have three screen capture programs running on my PCs-ScreenCapturePrint, SnippingTool, and Snapshot. Before I tell you about each of these great freeware programs and where you can download them free, I want to take a moment to talk about the proper way to download any program from the internet. There is a right way and a wrong way to it. There’s a safe way and an unsafe way to do it. Do it the wrong way and you’re opening your computer up to viruses and hackers.
I’ll use SnapShot to illustrate this downloading tutorial. The safe way to down load any program is to save it to a file, then scan that file for viruses and other malware before opening it and running the install. Let’s use a digital-editing program for this tutorial. Picasa by Google is a good basic editing program so we’ll use that one.
Open the Google Picasa downloads page http://picasa.google.com/
Click on “Download Picasa 3
After clicking on the “Download Picasa 3” the download dialog box opens
Click on the "Save" button.
Your computer will ask you to select the folder to download the file to.
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As you an see I save any photography related downloads to Jerry>Downloads>Photography. Makes good sense, right?
Click the "Save" button at the bottom right to start the download.
The download progress diaglog box opens.
Click on the “Save button” at the bottom right of the screen.
The “Download Progress” dialog box opens.
If you check “Close this dialog box when the download completes” the box will close automatically. This keeps you from accidentially interrupting the download.
Open the folder where you stored the download.
Right click on the downloaded file to open the options menu.
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Left click on "Scan Picasa3-setup.exe." The icon that you will see depends on the antivirus program that you have on your computer. Once the scan is complete the program will give you the green light if the file is free of malware.
To install the program simply left click the program file and follow the onscreen prompts.
Here are the links to download the three screenshot programs that I use. They are so intuitive that my nine year old grand daughter can use them so I won’t bother explaining how to use them here.
The links are:
SnapShot http://snapshot.jorijn.com/
SnippingTool http://files.uberdownloads.com/apps/LoadnGo_Snip/index.php
ScreenCapturePrint http://www.snapfiles.com/get/screencapprint.html
