You already use the Snipping Tool. Look at what it does now.

There is one tool on Windows that I find extremely useful. It's a tool I use every single day. In my professional life and in my personal life. It's probably a tool you've heard of, and it's probably a tool you've used. It's the Windows Snipping Tool. You might have been using it for years. It's recently added a lot of new features to make life easier.

Hold down the Windows key and Shift, then press S, or search "Snip".

Your screen dims, a small toolbar appears at the top, and you drag a box around whatever you want to capture. From there it goes into an email, a text, a document, or a Facebook comment.

Where the picture goes

Think of it as a pair of scissors for the screen. You cut out the part you want, and the cutting is the same as copying or using Ctrl+C. It waits there until you paste it somewhere with Ctrl+V.

It's on the clipboard, and it sits there until you paste it or until you capture something else on top of it. Windows keeps a history of that pocket as well, which is one of a handful of shortcuts most people never go looking for.

Three steps.

1. Windows key + Shift + S
2. Drag a box around the part you want
3. Go where the picture belongs and press Ctrl+V

This is the Snipping Tool you may have used before. However, there have been some improvements.

The four shapes

The shape button sits next to the camera icon, and clicking the little arrow beside it opens the list.

Rectangle is the default and the one you'll use nearly every time. Drag a box, let go.

Window captures one whole window on its own, without the desktop behind it. Hover over the window you want and click it. This is the one for sending somebody an entire error box or an entire browser window with clean edges.

Full screen takes everything on the display in one click, taskbar and all.

Freeform lets you draw any shape you like with the mouse.

Marking it up before you send it

After a capture, a notification slides into the corner. It tells you what it just did with the picture, and it has a Markup and share button on it.

Click that and the Snipping Tool opens with your picture already in it.

Along the top are a pen, a highlighter, and an eraser, plus a crop button and a shapes button. The shapes button is the one to go find, because it holds a square, a circle, a line, and an arrow.

An arrow drawn around the button you want somebody to click will save you a paragraph of explaining.

If you need more than that, the Edit in Paint button opens the same picture in Paint for resizing and adding text.

Where it gets saved

The picture goes on the clipboard every time. That's the copy you paste.

Windows 11 also writes a file. Open the Snipping Tool, click See More (the three dots at the top right), then Settings, and the switch is called Automatically save original screenshots. Underneath it the folder is spelled out, along with a Change button if you want it somewhere else.

Take a look even if you never change anything, because that folder is often inside OneDrive rather than on the computer itself, and people go hunting in the wrong place.

For a copy somewhere specific, Save as puts it where you choose. Ctrl+S saves and Ctrl+C copies without reaching for the mouse.

Three ways to grab the whole screen

The Full screen shape on the snipping toolbar sends the whole display to the clipboard.

Pressing PrtSc on its own does the same thing, and nothing appears to happen when you do it. Paste it somewhere to see it.

Windows key + PrtScn saves the whole screen as a file, in Pictures then Screenshots, and the screen dims for a moment so you know it worked. Microsoft notes that a keyboard without a PrtScn key can use Fn + Windows key + Space bar instead.

Copying the words out of a picture

Take a snip of anything with writing in it, then click the Text actions button. Hover over it and the tooltip calls it Scan text, which is the better name for what it does. The tool reads the words in the image and offers to copy all of them, or to copy them as a table if it's looking at rows and columns.

Good for a confirmation number, an error message, or an address on a page that won't let you select it. Microsoft says the reading happens on your own device. Your phone will pull text out of a photograph the same way, which is its own trick.

It reads QR codes too. Snip one and the address inside it appears right on top of the code, so you don't have to point your phone at your own monitor.

When the thing you want keeps disappearing

Menus close the moment you click anywhere else, which makes them hard to capture. Open the Snipping Tool, click the arrow next to the timer icon, and pick a delay.

Press New, open the menu you're after, and wait. When the screen goes gray the countdown is done, and you can drag your box with the menu still sitting open.

Recording instead of a picture

Windows key + Shift + R starts a screen recording. Drag a box around the area, then a small bar appears with a Start button, a timer, and a microphone toggle if you want to talk over it.

Do the thing, press Stop. Recordings save to Videos then Screen Recordings.

What else is in the picture

A screenshot catches everything inside the box you drew. Your email address up in the corner. The titles of every tab across the top. The name of the document you had open behind it. Somebody's phone number sitting in the message underneath. You meant to send one line of an error and you sent your inbox.

Most of the time the solution is to just draw a better box.

Windows 11 has a button for it as well. Open the snip, choose Text actions, then Quick redact, and it blacks out email addresses and phone numbers it finds in the image.

Windows puts up its own warning right after it does this, and the warning is the correct one. Quick redact covers email addresses and phone numbers. It has no idea what a street address or an account number looks like, so read the picture yourself before you send it.

Two things it won't do

It can't follow a long page down as you scroll. Microsoft says so plainly in its own FAQ, and says a full scrolling page needs a different tool. Take two or three snips instead.

And if the keys do nothing at all, Microsoft's own answer is to check Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard, and to make sure another program hasn't claimed that shortcut for itself.

One more pass through the buttons

Open it once and press New, then work your way across the row along the top. Every one of those icons does something, and none of them are hidden. They arrived a few at a time without much announcement, and most people are still using the tool the way they used it in 2019.

If you find something in there I skipped, write back and tell me. I only started using half of these myself this year.