Capturing a Window or Entire Screen

To copy an image of the active window press the Alt key while also pressing the Print Screen key. The Print Screen key should be on the top row to the right of the function keys. To copy an image of the entire screen press the Print Screen key by itself. This copies the active window or entire screen to the clipboard as a bitmap image which can be pasted into any application capable of importing graphic images such as MS Word, Windows Wordpad, MS Photo Editor, Adobe Photo Shop, etc.

Pasting an Image into an Application

Open the application you want to paste the image into. In this example I am going to save an image of a Windows Explorer view of my floppy disk and copy it to a Wordpad document. After a screen or window image has been copied to the clipboard with the Alt + Print Screen key combination go to the applicable application and paste the clipboard contents. For virtually all Windows applications this can be done via Edit | Paste or Ctrl-V.

Figure 1. Selecting Paste from the Wordpad Edit Menu

Figure 2. Windows Explorer screen copied to a Wordpad document