Greetings citizens!
Throughout the course of my career, I’ve found that explaining a computer-related issue to someone can be far more difficult than it should be. In a lot of cases it can be made clearer by providing written instruction for them to walk through at their own pace. To supplement this, I’ve found myself increasingly turning to an expeditious screenshot program known as Greenshot.
Providing similar functionality to the Windows Snipping Tool, Greenshot is a piece of screenshot-capturing software for Windows. It functions entirely through the use of hotkey combinations to capture screenshots with varying parameters (Figure 1). The most useful of these is the ability to capture specific regions of the screen (default hotkey: Print Screen). After selecting what you want to capture, a context menu will appear, allowing you to select from various destinations for the screen capture(Figure 2). This is the step that makes the software so elegant; the scope of the available options covers nearly all destinations someone would want, and all from a single menu.
It should be mentioned that Greenshot’s built-in image editor (accessed by selecting ‘Open in image editor’ from the context menu) is great for creating tutorials on the fly, when words don’t convey the idea as intended (Figure 3). Basic tools for drawing emphasis are present including shape creation, highlighting, and adding text boxes. Once the image has been editted to your satisfaction, it can be exported to any of the destinations available in the context menu mentioned earlier.
Once you’ve mastered the software, you’ll find yourself using Greenshot for just about anything. Its versatility is only enhanced by its simplicity, a combination that is growing increasingly uncommon in the digital age. Now go forth, and capture!