Friday, June 5, 2015

Use the Snipping Tool in Delay Mode

Over the years I've used a number of screen capture tools. They are great for demonstrating how to steps or documenting a bug. In the past, I would recommend Snagit as the best capture software but then in Windows Vista Microsoft added the Snipping Tool. Snagit remains my recommendation for as one of the best full featured capture tool (with video capture and image markup) but for quick screen capture the Snipping Tool is great.

One of the items that appears to be missing from the Snipping Tool is a delayed mode so you can capture a menu or dropdown list after it is expanded. Well it turns out you can do a delayed capture with the Snipping Tool even if it's not obvious how to trigger it.

First start the Snipping Tool. If it's in capture mode hit Cancel so the window looks like:


Next open the menu or drop down the list you want to capture then press the "Ctrl" + "Print Screen" buttons on your keyboard. This will trigger a new capture with the screen locked as it is so you can get an image of the menu.

In Windows 10 it looks like the delayed mode will become easier to do with an explicit UI button to trigger it (info from Neowin)




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you. I am creating a manual for our company and was struggling with the regular Fn+Print Screen, paste into photo program, and crop to a blurry result. Your trick worked a charm.