DEMO: Screen Capture and Recording

Something that I use to convey information is a screen recorder. Sometimes you have to explain things to other people, and it's best if you can record and send them something, or send them a screenshot explaining what to do.

Taking a Screenshot with the Snipping Tool

I'm on a Windows machine. I'm going to need to do a demo on something, so I'm going to hit control N to bring up a new window. This is just going to be of the desktop here. Let's say I'm explaining to a user how to get to something. A couple ways that I can do this: number one is I could just take a picture of this and show them where to go.

So what I'll do is I'm going to click the start menu and I'm going to go Snipping Tool and hit enter. First of all, what I can do is I can select whether I want the photo, and if I want to choose a rectangle, the window, full screen, or free form, and then if I want there to be any kind of delay with this. I don't want there to be a delay, I just want to do free form, and I'm going to select new.

Maybe what I want to do is I want to show them the window, so this is the desktop window and maybe a few of the icons in here, but I don't necessarily need to go for the whole window, so I'm just going to do this right here. Maybe I'm explaining to them how to get to the control panel, so I'm going to then mark this up. Maybe I do a box around the control panel. I've got the highlighter selected, so I'm going to want to do a square, so I select this tool right here to do the square and I pull it out, and then now I've got that annotated. Maybe I want to mark a circle around something — I can mark a circle. So I do whatever kind of altering of this that I want. At this point in time I could either save this to the drive and send it over to them, or if maybe I'm putting it in an email, I'm going to copy it and then I'll paste it into the email.

Recording the Screen

But let's say I want to actually explain to them a process. Well then I can do the video here. I can click on new, and maybe in this case I do want the full window here, and then I'll start, and then I'll go through the explanation. I don't have a microphone set up on this computer, but let's say I turn the microphone on and say, then what you're going to do is you're going to go into the control panel, and then while you're in the control panel click on Network and Internet — and step them through the process.

Once I'm done, I'm going to hit stop, and then same thing, I can then either save this out, or copy it and paste it into something, or edit in Clipchamp. So I can then bring it into Clipchamp and actually edit the video.

So that is the Snipping Tool, and it's extremely helpful when you're trying to explain something to somebody else.