Since this week had a holiday right in the middle of it, pretty much everyone I know seems to have been in vacation mode. Plus, the weather has been great here, so when choosing between sitting in front of a computer and being outside, well, hanging out with Mr. Sun looks a lot more appealing.
However, amidst the holiday lethargy and basic nerd work, I helped some folks set up a contact database. We talked about entering data and appointments, running reports, and so on. But the thing that garnered the most enthusiasm was probably the simplest: doing a screen capture.
They wanted to show their Board of Directors…"hey, look at all the great data we’re tracking now!" And the easiest way to do that was by basically "taking a picture" of their contact management software. To do this, first, be sure to select the window you want to capture. Then hold down the Alt key and press the PrintScrn button, which copies the image to the Windows clipboard. Now open up your favorite program, such as Word or WordPad, or some other program. Choose Edit|Paste and voila, there’s your screen!
If you paste the screen into a bitmap editing program like Photoshop, you can save it as a file and modify it like any other bitmap.
As for the not necessarily-nerdy stuff, pet owners will appreciate my other great accomplishment this week: washing four dogs. On the Fourth of July it was hot out, so I undertook the project of washing the hounds. (One dog smelled so bad that you could smell her approaching…big ick.) So all canine household members got hosed off on the patio, which has a drain. It worked out pretty well and I also was able to cut toenails on 3 out of 4 dogs (egad!). After that, since I was completely grody I vacuumed the house, which was scary. I even vacuumed behind the dog beds and found enough hair back there to build my own chihuahua.
Here it was Dog Hair Independence Day I guess…