Sometimes when trying to diagnose an issue with how a computer has been set up, words simply aren’t enough and you need to see what the person at the other end can see on their screen.
One of the simplest ways to do this is to send a ‘screen grab’.
In Windows:
Make sure you can see the information on your screen that you wish to share with whoever is helping you, then press the ‘Print Screen’ or ‘PrtSc’ button on your keyboard. (Usually this button is in the top right area of your keyboard.)
This will copy a picture of everything on your screen to your clipboard. Then, if you open a Word document or an email program like Outlook, you will be able to paste (Ctrl+V) the picture into the email and send it to someone to show what you can see!
If you click ‘Alt + PrtSc’ you will take a picture of just the ‘active’ window, not the full screen. You might want to do this to send a picture of an error message you receive, without showing other sensitive documents or emails on your screen at the same time.
In Mac OSX:
Press ‘Command+Shift+3′ (the number 3 on your keyboard) – this will take a picture of your entire screen and create a file called something like “Picture 1.png”. You can then email that picture to your helpful remote expert.
Press ‘Command+Shift+4′ to chose a portion of the screen. A crosshair appears allowing you to drag and select just the section of the screen you want to show.
For more options in Mac OSX, you could open the ‘Grab’ software, which you should find in your applications folder.
