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One of the cool Mac OS features is its ability to take snapshots, or "screenshots" of whatever happens to be displayed on your monitor at any given time.

Prior to Mac OS 8, pressing the Command-shift-3 key combination would create a PICT graphic image of the entire screen and save it to disk, accompanied by a camera-shutter-like sound. The PICT files will be found in your hard drive window labeled: Picture 0, Picture 1, and so on. However, with Mac OS 8 and later, screenshots became a lot more versatile.

Screenshots are a feature that we writers use extensively for producing article illustrations, but many other Mac users will find them convenient from time to time. Sometimes a picture is really worth a thousand words, and screenshots are a good way of creating illustrations for Websites.

With OS 8 and later, you can still of course use Command-shift-3 as always, but that creates very large images, especially with today's big, high-resolution screens. Such images can be opened in a graphics program like PhotoShop or Color It!, and cropped, edited, and saved in other graphics file formats. SimpleText will also open screenshot PICTs and allow you to copy selected parts of the images to the clipboard.

However, it's usually more convenient to copy just the part of the screen contents you want to save in the first place. You can do this several ways:

Command-shift-4 changes the cursor into a crosshair that you can drag across the desired area of the screen to capture rectangular or square image. I find that it is a good idea to go just a bit larger than the area you want, and then do the final cropping in a graphics program.

Caps lock-Command-shift-4 turns the cursor into a bullseye tool that you can click inside a window or dialog box to capture it as your screen shot. No cropping will be necessary, but you will still usually want to convert the image to another format such as a GIF or JPEG or PNG for pasting to a Website for instance.

If you add the Control key to any of the above mentioned key combinations, the captured image will be transferred to the the Clipboard rather than saved to disk as a PICT file.

Menu windows used to be impossible to capture with screenshots, but with recent Mac OS versions it can be done by clicking on the menu name, which will pop the menu open for 15 seconds; long enough for a screen capture.