Windows 8 In Depth

Snipping Tool

The Snipping Tool lets you grab a portion of the computer screen and paste it into a document. It’s useful for taking notes while you’re working with your computer, especially to extract information from websites that don’t let you easily select text or graphics from the displayed pages. You can simply pick up the interesting part of the page, and paste it into a Word or WordPad document as an image. It’s also helpful if you create how-to manuals that involve computer programs. Note that this tool saves bitmap images, not editable or pasteable text, when you use it to snip text off the screen. Think of it as a type of scanner.

To use it, start the Snipping Tool and select New. Then, before you select the portion of the screen you ...