Yet for less than what it would cost to take your spouse or partner out to a nice dinner and a movie, this software comes packed with everything you need to really impress your colleagues or clients. Snag-it is very easy to learn and use and much easier to install. It can integrate itself into your browser, MS Office applications and Outlook, so you can click on the icon in the toolbar. If you want to copy a small text of an email, even just a paragraph, Snag-it allows you to select only the portion you wish to capture and then it opens up into a powerful editing program where you can add text and polish to make it look professional.

Here is a quick rundown of how Snag-It works. Everytime you start up Windows, Snag-It launches in the background ready to go. When you want to get a screen shot of something like a web page, a menu drop-down list, or even an animated Flash object, simply type in the default key command - Ctrl-Shift-P. The cursor changes to a crosshair and all you need to do is select a starting point from one corner of the object and drag diagonally to the other corner. As soon as you let go of the mouse, Snag-It opens the Capture Preview where you can preview the screen capture, just like the example above.

But that's not all. You can add ballooned text, shapes and arrows to provide information about your screen capture. If you are doing a training document, you can add special effects like torn paper edge to make it look like it was ripped away or shadows to give it a 3D effect. Snag-it comes with so many tools that it would make the Windows Paint or Microsoft Office Draw tools pale in comparison.

When you are done, Snag-it gives you many options to share or store your screen capture. You can save it as a jpg or bmp file. You can copy and paste it into Word, Powerpoint, Excel or any other editing application. You can simply click on the Send E-Mail icon to launch your default email application and display it in an email message.

Snag-it comes with many different capture options like region - where you can select what part of the window or dialog you wish to capture. It also comes with the full dialog or window capture option as well. There is even more. If you like capturing articles from the web - but cannot get it in your small screen, Snag-It capture settings allow you to scroll the page automatically or manually. This allows you to capture an entire web page from top to bottom regardless of your visible area.

If you want to use Snag-It for training purposes, you can archive the screen captures along with your ballooned text and colored shapes into the built-in Snag-It Catalog to store and access later. The Catalog browser allows you to view thumbnails of your captures and organize them in your local, portable or network file system.

Snag-It has an excellent user support and learning center on its web site where you can learn more about using the tool and how others are using it. In addition, the site has a download area where you can download add-ins to get more out of the already feature- laden tool. One example of a plug-in that I really like is the Wordpress blog plug in. This allows you to post screen captures to your Wordpress blog account.

This very powerful and versatile tool can be all yours for only $49.95 from Techsmith (http://www.Techsmith.com) and you can either download it or order the boxed-set. Not convinced? Download the trial version and give it a shot, you'll wonder how you ever got along with out it!

P.S. - All my screenshots here were done with Snag-It.

Richard P. Meagher
Engineering Applications Supervisor
BorgWarner MorseTEC
Rmeagher@borgwarner.com