Up until about two weeks ago, I’d been using Mac stuff for the past… well, lets estimate ten years. I’ve been using PCs occasionally, like when I needed to find a certain book at the public library… and to log in at the DMV. So that said, I’ve got a few things to pick up on with regard to PC computing.
Here’s one example: In the past, I’ve only used screen shots to save a picture of my desktop if my fickle Apple told me that a fatal error had occurred, and that the program I was using needed to be shut down. This almost always happened when I reached the 2/3 mark in a great article I was writing (with a killer lead that took half a day to nail down…) The screen shot allowed me to take a picture of those prized words, so that I wouldn’t have to conjure up another 700 words or so. It was kismet! Screenshots saved my life more than once.
But yesterday, I got to try and figure out this awesome function on a PC… so that I had a nifty little Excel window snapshot for News From the Edge – our quarterly newsletter that I’m putting together for the first time.
Those of you who are versed in PC will already know that there’s a button on the keyboard that says “Prt Sc.” That’s all well and good, but “Prt Sc.” means nothing to me. On my familiar friend, the Mac, to do a screenshot you hold down the “shift,” “apple” and “3” keys all at once. That takes a picture that lands on your desktop in a .jpg format! Sweet!
Using my favorite search buddy, I looked up “Screen Shots” and found out that there are lots of kind folks who want to share this info with me! But there was one problem remaining… all their diagrams were showing regular keyboards. Their keyboards have a separate area where the “Print Screen” button is located (note: the words are spelled out on a full keyboard.) And this looks nothing like the key area on my gorgeous new laptop.
I’m not going to tell you how long it took me to find “Prt Sc” because that’s just embarrassing. But now, whenever somebody searches “site:www.dynedge.com Screenshots” they’ll come here, and feel better. 🙂
They say you learn something new every day!
