I'm sure you are wondering about my strange title. As I hit 200,000 points on Active Rain Bob Stewart noticed and gave me a call so I could do a screen shot as I went over. I was so impressed that he noticed. I know it is one of those things that are hard to keep track of as it often happens in the middle of the night. I really do love the people on Active Rain both the actual management and the people I meet. Having a small brokerage it gives me a place to talk to people and trade ideas.
How I have been able to accumulate so many points I think can be attributed to my consistency. I regularly make my 10 comments a day and I do about 3 to 4 posts a week. I wrote a more detailed thank you to Active Rain and testimonial when I was at my one year anniversary but my feelings are still the same.
So back to the screen shot; this should have just been a slam dunk. As we were talking on the phone I was sitting in front of my computer and tried to do a screen shot. However, I just recently upgraded to Vista (not by my choice for that story click here) and as with everything else I found the way I do screen shots did not work on Vista. Not being able to do a screen shot was going to bug me until I figured it out so after getting off of the phone with Bob I did a Google search and found an article about doing a screen shot with Vista. You would not believe HOW EASY it is now to do a screen shot!! It takes about 1 minute to do a screen shot and save it as a jpg.
If you have Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise or the Ultimate editions there is a snipping tool available for screen shots. Now how you know about this is beyond me; all I can say is Thank God for Google searches.
You want to go to the Start Menu and do a search for "snipping". The snipping tool will come up and you click on it to open it up. You now click on the arrow buttons and decide if you want a full shot, rectangular shot etc. I did my AR points with a rectangular shot. If you aren't happy with how it turned out you just go back up and hit New and you can start over. When you are finished you just save it as an image file. Personally I usually save them as jpegs; as it seems to be universally accepted. Here's my final JPG. Notice that it has a red border that is a default position so if you want to change the border you need to go to options in the snipping tool and change it.
For a more complete explanation on how to use the snippet tool to make a screen s
hot on Vista go to this article that was on About.com. The article also gives some tips. For example if you want to retain crisp lines and keep the file size small, save it as a GIF file. If your screen shot has lots of colors and you want to retain crisp lines and full quality save it as PNG file. If your screen shots has lot of colors but you want to make the file size small then save it as a JPEG file.
I have been a reluctant Vista user but I am finding things I like. I have started a Windows Vista & Office 2007 Group so those of us taking the plunge can learn together. If you are a Vista user or just considering taking the plunge please consider joining us.
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