by John Pieza
We have often had clients call and say that they got some error message on the screen of their Mac, but they didn’t remember what it said, and they didn’t write it down. We always recommend taking a screenshot, a picture of your current screen.
To take a screenshot hold down the Command key and the Shift key at same time as you tap the number 3 on the keyboard. (Command-Shift-3) This takes a picture of your whole screen and saves it to the Desktop with the name “Screen shot…” followed by the current date and time. To take a picture of just a portion of your screen you can hold down the Command key and the Shift key at the same time as you tap the number 4 (Command-Shift-4). This will turn the cursor into a crosshairs that you can use to click and drag over the area that you want to capture.
I have also used screenshots to capture parts of webpages that won’t print out normally. This sometimes happens with Flash content and with some web pages that print out in strange columns.
Screen shots are great ways of capturing exactly what’s displayed on your Mac’s screen.