How to Add Screen Shots with Microsoft Word

Writing a How-To article? If you’re writing computer instructions in Microsoft Word it's helpful to show screen shots. Here's how.

Turn on your computer and launch the program or website you want to use to illustrate your article.

Launch Microsoft Word and open a document.

Decide whether you want to show your entire desktop as well as the active screen, or just the screen. Both are possible.

• To take a shot of just the active screen, hold down the ALT key and tap PrtScn. The shot is in your buffer.
• To take a shot of your entire desktop, hold down the CTRL key and tap PrtScn. The shot is in your butter.

To move the shot out of your buffer into the word processing document, place your cursor in the document where you want the shot to appear. Press down the CTRL key and tap V. This will paste the screen shot into your  Word document.

Resize the image in the document by clicking on the edge of the image. Then move your cursor over one corner of the image until your cursor is a two way arrow cursor. Press on your left mouse button and the cursor becomes a + sign cursor. Continue pressing with your left button and drag your cursor in towards the middle of the image to make it smaller, or out towards the edge of the document to make it larger.

You can also use Word’s picture toolbar or Format Picture to crop the image, or resize it. Right click on the image to find those menu choices.

Save the document.

Tips

• In Word you can add call-outs to your image to describe different sections of the screen. That's a whole separate lesson.
• Other graphics software will give you many more options for resizing and editing your image. If you want to save the image as a separate file, you need to use a graphics program.
• Images that haven't been edited in a graphics program to limit their size can be very large. If you want to email a document containing screen shots, be sure to edit them first.