How To Take a Screenshot on a Mac

Taking a screenshot of your entire screen, or a portion of it, can be very useful in showing someone what you see on your screen without setting up a screen sharing program. Some possible uses of screenshots are:

HelpRequest / Support ticket
documentation
pasting into emails
pasting into chats ( how to set up iChat )
etc.

Below are instructions for the Mac OS X. Click here for PC instructions.

First, determine if you want a screenshot of:

your entire screen
a portion of your screen
a specific window

Then, decide if you want to save the screenshot to a file or to the Clipboard.

Here are the keyboard shortcuts to do any of the above. If you are saving to a file, the screenshot will be saved to your Desktop using the timestamp as the filename.

	Entire Screen	Portion of Screen	Specific Window
Save to a file	⌘ + Shift + 3	⌘ + Shift + 4 then select an area	⌘ + Shift + 4 then select a window
Save to the Clipboard	⌘ + Control + Shift + 3	⌘ + Control + Shift + 4 then select an area	⌘ + Control + Shift + 4 then select a window
Note: Press ESC to exit out of the screenshot selection.

Happy screenshooting.