Using OneNote: (4) Doing Screen Captures

One of the neat features provided by OneNote is the ability to quickly capture any part of the screen and put it into a OneNote note, or put it into the Windows clipboard to be used (pasted back) for use anywhere.

There are a number of ways to activate OneNote’s screen capture function but the quickest and easiest way is to use the shortcut key sequence Win+S. This simply means holding down the Win key (generally located between the Ctrl and Alt key on a ‘standard’ keyboard) and then hitting the “s” key. Doing this will bring up OneNote’s screen clipper.

When you do Win+S the screen will go foggy, like the example below.

Then as you click the mouse and select something on the screen to capture that part of the screen will become un-foggy, as illustrated in the following example.

When you let the mouse button go then OneNote will put up the following menu.

At this point you can either put the screen capture directly into a OneNote page by selecting the Notebook and the Page, or simply put it on the Clipboard by clicking the option “Copy to Clipboard” at the bottom of the dialogue window.

If you select "Copy to Clipboard” then you can paste it into something else such as a e‑mail message, a Word document, PowerPoint, or into a raster editor for editing—which is exactly how I did all of the above screen captures. I pasted them into Adobe Elements, resampled them to fit my posting width (the first two anyway), did some small image enhancing, and then saved them for putting into the post.

At right is the exact bit that was clipped from the screen with no clean up editing

I find using OneNote’s Win+S is about the best way to grab bits of the screen, especially for quick inclusion into e-mail messages or OneNote pages, but it only works if you have Microsoft’s OneNote installed on your computer.