Q. How do I take a snapshot of the screen and place the image into a publication using PageMaker and Microsoft Publisher?

A. If you want to capture the whole screen, open the application or file that you want to take a shot of. Press the PrintScreen key on the keyboard. This puts an image of the screen onto the Windows clipboard and it can be pasted into any application, but we prefer to paste it into a picture editor such as Photoshop. Microsoft Image Editor or Paint Shop Pro will also do.

If you want to capture only the active window (and not the taskbar/desktop background) do the same as above, but use ALT + PrintScreen.

Switch to Photoshop (or other image editor) and open a new file. We usually choose RGB mode and a white background). Now use Edit>Paste and put the captured image currently on the clipboard into the new file. Clean up the image as required and add text if necessary. We usually keep the 'master' of the image in uncompressed TIFF format because the screen may appear blotchy in other formats. We place that TIFF image into PageMaker, because it will but if we want to use it in a web page, open the TIFF file and use SaveAs and create a JPEG file (where there are many colours in the image) or GIF for 256 colours. The GIF file can also be made transparent and Photoshop does an excellent job of reducing file size on its File and Export function.