A "screenshot" is a snapshot of what's on your computer's screen. For instance, here is a screenshot of what I see when I go to Google.

You can see that the screenshot includes everything that I normally see on my computer screen, including the titles, menus and stuff at the bottom of the screen.

The reason it looks kind of fuzzy is because I have made the screenshot smaller to fit here. If I had left it the original size it would be just as clear as any page on my computer.

So how do you make screenshots?

You don't have to buy any special software to make screenshots. Your computer already has the cabability to do it quickly and easily.

To create a screenshot follow these steps:

1. Open the page that you want to capture and leave it up on your computer screen.

2. Press the PrintScreen button on your keyboard and let it up. (To find the PrintScreen or PrtScrn button, look on the right hand side of your keyboard).

3. You have now saved an image of your screen on your computer's clipboard. You won't be able to see it, but it's there (it's a similar idea to when you copy and paste).

4. Open a graphics program such as Paint. Everyone has Paint on their PC. To access it, click Start>Programs>Accessories>Paint.

5. Once you have Paint open, click "new" to create a new empty image.

6. Click Edit>Paste to paste in the screenshot you just took.

7. You will now see your screenshot as a picture. Click File>Save As and save your file in a place that you will remember. If it asks you what format you want to save in, choose PNG.

8. Now you have an image file of the screen saved on your computer. You can insert it into a document or webpage just like any other image.

Additional points:

If you want to skip the Paint steps, you can also paste the screenshot directly into a word processing program such as Word and into certain email programs such as Outlook.

This basic method will result in a full-size screenshot. This follow-up article explains how to make your screenshot smaller.

This article was chosen for the Carnival of Blogging Success.