The Little Black Book of Online Business: 1001 Insider Resources Every Business Owner Needs

Chapter 63. Screen Capture

It can be very useful to capture (record) your computer screen as you perform a specific task. That recording can become an instructional video or tutorial for your staff and/or clients, or perhaps a demo video to show to your prospects.

If all you need is a still image of your screen, you can do that without any special software, though the process is different for Windows and Mac computers.

For Windows, just press the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard (Windows PCs) and the current screen contents will be copied to your clipboard. You can then paste that into any graphics editor.

For your Mac, hit the Command (Apple) key, the Shift key, and the number 3 key simultaneously. This will save the current screen to the desktop as a PDF file. Or you can use the number 4 key, instead of 3, and that will allow you to select an area of the screen to capture to the PDF file.

Or (man, these Macs have a lot of options!) you can press the Control key at the same time as those listed above, and the screen will be captured to the clipboard, which you can then paste into a graphics program, email, or other document.

But what if you are trying to capture a web page that doesn't fit on one screen? The following screen capture tools have an option that can scroll the screen and capture the whole page as one long image. They also include some image manipulation and editing features.

http://www.techsmith.com/snagit.asp

http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

http://www.hyperionics.com/ ...