Q. I want to print a copy of what is on my screen to the printer. My keyboard has a key that says Print Scrn and I assumed that would print the screen but it doesn't. How can I do this?

A. If you want to print a web page you can always use the commands File - Print from the top menu to print the page(s). If you really want to print a copy of exactly what shows on the screen, this is how you do it.

You were correct that the Print Scrn (or Prnt Scrn on some keyboards) key is what you want to use. But when you press that, Windows doesn't just print the screen. That would be too easy .

Windows captures the contents of the screen to a temporary area or buffer. You need to paste the contents of this buffer, the image of the screen, to any application that can handle graphics. For example, you could paste it into Paint, WordPad, Word or other word processors.

After pressing the Prnt Scrn key, go to your application (like Word) and hold down the Cntrl key and press V or use the pulldown menus on the top and select Edit - Paste, and the image of the screen will appear.

This includes any open windows, headers, title bars and everything else that was on the screen when you pressed the key. This can be very useful for training purposes - being able to show someone exactly what the screen looks like.

If you just want to capture the contents of the active window and not everything on the screen, just make sure that you hold down the Alt key when you press Prt Scrn. Repeat the pasting process to get just the selected, active window.

In either case, then just use the Print function (usually File - Print) of the application to get a hard copy of the screen image.

Give it a try. It's easy and you can always delete the image.

Answered by Tech Expert Dan Hanson