If you've ever wanted to take a snapshot of your desktop, a web site, an error message, or illustrate a "how to" tip or article -- this tip is for you.

Some graphics programs come with a dedicated screen capture utility that allow you to do this graphic's chore easily and with a variety of options. There are also stand alone screen capture utilities available. But your standard Windows keyboard will do the trick quite nicely too.

Here's how to take a screen capture, or a picture of what is on your screen:

To copy the entire screen as it appears on your monitor, press the "Print Scrn" or "Print Screen" button on your keyboard.

To make a copy of the active window, press the following buttons on your keyboard: "Alt"+"Print Scrn".

Note: Using screenshots are also useful for helping out a technical support person find out more about your software problems. For instance, it can be helpful to provide a screenshot of any error messages that you get.

What do you do with the screen capture now?

The screen capture is loaded into your Windows Clipboard utility...So now, you simply paste the screen capture into your favorite image editor. Once you've pasted the screen capture as a new document, you can crop and re-sample the image to your desired image dimensions. From there you can save the new image into whatever image format that you need, (JPG, GIF, etc...).