How to Take a Screenshot on Dell (5 Easy Methods)

Look at the top row of your Dell keyboard, just past F12 toward the upper right. The key is usually labeled PrtScn, PrtSc, or Prnt Scrn. On full-size Dell desktop keyboards it sits between F12 and the Delete key.

On smaller Dell laptops, like an XPS 13 or a 14-inch Inspiron, the Print Screen label is printed in small text and shares a key with another function. If the label looks faint or sits in the bottom half of the keycap, you will need to hold the Fn key in the lower-left corner together with Print Screen. Try the key on its own first - if nothing happens, add Fn.

Tap the Print Screen key once. Nothing visible happens on your Dell. Windows quietly copies a snapshot of your entire desktop to the clipboard - every open window, the taskbar, and every connected monitor.

To see the screenshot, open Paint, Word, an email, or any app that accepts pasted images. Press Ctrl + V. The screenshot drops in. From Paint you can crop it, save it as a JPG or PNG, or print it. This is the fastest way on a Dell to grab everything at once when you do not care about cropping.

Click the window you want to capture so it is the active window on your Dell. Then hold Alt and tap Print Screen. Windows copies only that window to the clipboard - skipping your desktop, your taskbar, and every other open app.

This is the cleanest way to share a screenshot of a single program. No cropping, no extra background. Paste it into Paint or an email with Ctrl + V. The screenshot will match the exact size of the window border, so big windows make big screenshots and small windows make small ones.

Hold the Windows logo key and tap Print Screen on your Dell. The screen dims for half a second to confirm the capture. Behind the scenes Windows saves a PNG file straight to your computer.

Open File Explorer, go to This PC, then Pictures, then a folder called Screenshots. Your image is in there, named Screenshot (1), Screenshot (2), and so on. No clipboard, no pasting, no extra apps - the file is already saved on your Dell and ready to attach to an email or upload anywhere.

This is the most flexible built-in option on your Dell. Press Windows + Shift + S together. Your screen dims and a small toolbar appears at the top of the screen with four icons: rectangular snip, freeform snip, window snip, and fullscreen snip.

Click the rectangular icon, then drag a box around the part of the screen you want. Release the mouse and Windows copies that region to your clipboard. A small notification pops up in the bottom-right corner of your Dell. You can paste the snip into any app with Ctrl + V, or click the notification to open it for markup.

Click the small notification that popped up after your snip. The Snipping Tool editor opens on your Dell with your screenshot loaded. The toolbar gives you a red ballpoint pen, a yellow highlighter, an eraser, a ruler, and a crop tool.

Draw a circle around the important part, highlight a sentence, or crop off any extra space at the edges. When the snip looks the way you want, click the small save icon in the upper right (it looks like a floppy disk). Pick a folder on your Dell, name the file, and click Save. The image saves as PNG by default.

If you take screenshots every day on your Dell, install ShareX from getsharex.com. It is completely free and open source. Once installed, ShareX adds three things Windows does not have out of the box: scrolling screenshots that capture an entire long web page, OCR text capture that converts a screenshotted block of text into copy-pasteable words, and a real annotation editor with shapes, text boxes, arrows, and numbered step markers.

From the ShareX main window, click Capture, then pick Region, Window, Scrolling capture, or Text capture (OCR). You can also set a global hotkey so a single key press starts a snip on your Dell. After capture, ShareX can copy to your clipboard, save to a folder, and upload to Google Drive or Imgur all at the same time.