SubscribeVista’s Hidden Gems #1 – The Snipping Tool
Posted by stuart on October 16th 2006
This is the first in a series of posts about some of the hidden features that you probably haven’t heard mentioned anywhere else. First up, the snipping tool.
The snipping tool is used to grab screenshots and save them to common image formats. The tool can be launched from the Start Menu in the Accessories section, but the easier way is to open the start menu and just start typing “snipping”. You should see the tool pop up in the search results by the time you get to “snip”.
Once launched, you’re provided with a little toolbar that lets you choose what type of snipping area you want to create. You can choose from four types of snipping areas: Free form snip, Rectangular snip, Window snip, and Full screen snip. The names are self explanatory so I won’t go into too much detail here.
I chose the free form snip and drew an area around the screen I wanted to grab. Once you’ve got what you want, you can use the annotation tools to draw lines and highlights on the image before saving. This is useful if you want to highlight a section of the screen, or draw attention to one part by drawing an arrow as can be seen below. You can save the image as a PNG, JPG, GIF, or, (strangely enough) an MHT, which is a self contained HTML file. Or, you can email the file directly to a mail recipient as an attachment.
Here’s what the finished result looked like. The tool works great and is a cool little time-saver for those, like me, who are often grabbing screenshots. Hope this little hidden feature helps you too!
If you have any cool, hidden features you’ve found, let me know in the comments.
Posted by stuart
Filed under Windows Vista
Tagged with Windows Vista
13 Comments
This is awesome! I just love this feature!
Windows Vista sucks. I hates it forever. It is slow and buggy and makes little baby Jesus cry. It also pooped on my lawn. I do not like poop, so I do not like Windows Vista. Poop poop.
[...] Vista’s Hidden Gems #1 – The Snipping Tool This is the first in a series of posts about some of the hidden features that you probably haven’t heard mentioned anywhere else. First up, the snipping tool, which is used to grab screenshots and save them to common image formats. (tags: windows vista microsoft software operating-systems utilities tools hidden features) Tags: Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
The only thing missing on the snipping tool is the option to save in pdf format. Without that it is useless.
I guess I have to continue to use Snagit.
intwtl: saving to pdf may be a useful feature to you, but I don’t see the point. All of the screenshots I take are for either publication on the web or copied into Word documents. So I think you may be just a little over-dramatic when you say that the feature is useless without pdf support!
Cheers – Stuart.
[...] I ran into something interesting this morning when I went to use one of Vista’s little-known gems, the Snipping Tool. It’s a nifty little screen capture utility that I was very impressed with during the early [...]
the real snipping tool is missing on VISTA ultimate…
…
chk urself…
The snipping tool is also missing in vista home basic…
Actually, no, its not. I’m running ultimate on my desktop, and basic on my laptop, and the snipping tool is present and working on each
Funny, I’m running Ultimate on my desktop and Home Premium on my laptop, and it’s missing on my desktop, but present on my laptop. The executable isn’t even on the HDD on my desktop (I found it’s actual location on the laptop and navigated there manually, in addition to using the search function. Perhaps it’s a 64-bit Ultimate thing. (Though my laptop has it and is running 64-bit Home Premium, so it’s not universal to 64-bit flavors.)
I was going to ask Microsoft directly… but they only offer 90 days of support, so I’d have to pay $60.
This is a ‘Tablet PC Optional Component’, go into the add/remove program section and click turn ‘windows features on or off’, scroll to the bottom and check the ‘Tablet PC Optional Component’ check box.
-Edward
Thanks Edward! that solved my problem!
Now i have my snipping tool back!
i go to Control Panel>programs>Turn Windows features on or off and checked the ‘Tablet PC Optional Component’ check box.
The Snipping Tool is derived from the Snippy Application which is available as Freeware for XP. (The User Interface and menus are very very similar). Microsoft have managed to bloat it up in size so that it takes 15 seconds to load. Snippy was there in 2 seconds. Unfortunately the XP version of Snippy does not work on Vista so you stuck with this Microshite version.