How to Take a Full or Part Screenshot on a Mac or PC

On a PC it is easy to grab an image of what is on your computer screen (aka a “screenshot”), just hit the dedicated PrintScreen key on your keyboard (sometimes abbreviated as Print Scrn, Prnt Scrn, Prt Scn, Prt Scr, Prt Sc or Pr Sc). Doing this places an image of your screen PrtScninto the Clipboard. Pressing the Alt key with PrintScreen will put an image of just the active Window into the Clipboard. You can then paste (as in cut or copy and paste) that image into a document just as you would anything that is stored in the clipboard (Press Ctrl+V or the Paste icon on your toolbar).
More recent versions of Windows include the Snipping Tool – a handy utility for grabbing an image of a portion of your desktop. I have moved the Snipping Tool to my Start menu as I use it almost daily.
There is no dedicated PrintScreen key on a Mac keyboard. However, you can grab a screenshot of the entire screen on a Mac by if you hold down the Command and Shift keys and press the number 3. To take a screenshot of part of your screen, drag a box around it, then hold down the Command and Shift keys and press the number 3. Doing this creates a PNG image file on your desktop that contains your screenshot.
While there are fancier third party programs that let you capture things in more and different ways, the built-in screen capture functionality on PCs and Macs will often meet your needs.

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