How do I tell a non-tech-savvy person how to take a screenshot? “Press the Print Screen button” is easy, and I can walk them through uploading it. But what about the in-between step of moving it from your hard drive to a file? Is mspaint recommended because it’s installed?

I want these directions for novice computer users, the type who, quite often, really don’t know how to copy-and-paste, so “Use a graphics editor of your choice” is out. They’re often having computer issues, so I don’t want to direct them to download software.

Incidentally, the Mac is the exact opposite of Windows: it’s really hard to figure out how to take a screenshot (Apple-Shift-3?!), but once you do, it’s a piece of cake: it saves a PNG to your desktop. And you can do Apple-Shift-4 to select an area of the screen. If only the two merged, so that you could just press “Print Screen” like on every Windows computer ever made, and have it save an image to your desktop like ever Mac ever made, it would be so incredibly helpful.

Related posts:

1. Screenshots
2. Neat Compiz Effects
3. “Quotation” Marks
4. Thinking Aloud: Home Network
5. Undocumented Shortcuts & Tricks