Screenshots and Screen Recordings

Windows 11 offers several different methods by which you can create a screenshot, a still image that represents the contents of your PC's display. It also includes an app that let you create video recordings of what's happening on-screen.
Create, save, and share a screenshot
Here are the most popular methods for capturing a screenshot in Windows 11.
Use Print Screen to copy the screen or a window to the Clipboard
Every PC keyboard includes a Print Screen key, usually identified as PRT SC or similar, that, when pressed, copies a screenshot to the Windows Clipboard. From there, you can paste this image into Microsoft Paint, or any other image editor or application that can accept image formats, and then save it to disk and share it with others.

A> You may be wondering why this key is called Print Screen. After all, it doesn't print anything. But it used to: Print Screen dates back to the original IBM PC, which ran a text-only operating system called PC-DOS, which was made by Microsoft and sold by them as MS-DOS. In that pre-Windows era, Print Screen literally did print the text on-screen to whichever dot matrix printer was attached to its parallel port. But with the advent of graphical user interfaces like Windows, its usage changed and it is now used the capture the screen as an image.

When you press the Print Screen key, or PRINT SCREEN, an image of the entire screen--minus the mouse cursor--is copied to the Clipboard. If you would rather capture only the currently focused window, press ALT + PRINT SCREEN instead.

The first time you do this, OneDrive will display a notification asking if you would like to automatically save each screenshot that you take with Print Screen.

If you accept this offer, screenshots taken with Print Screen will no longer be ephemeral. Instead, each will be saved in PNG format to a new Screenshots folder found in your Pictures folder in OneDrive. These images will be available on the PC you're using as well as from the web and any other devices that are connected to your OneDrive.
If you deny this offer but later change your mind, you can configure OneDrive to automatically save screenshots by opening OneDrive settings and enabling the option "Save screenshots I capture to OneDrive" in the Sync and backup page.
Automatically save a screenshot as a file
Windows 11 also supports an alternate keyboard shortcut to Print Screen that provides two enhancements: it subtly flashes the screen to confirm that a screenshot was taken, and it automatically saves the resulting images to the Screenshots folder in your user account's Pictures folder.

To use this method, type WINKEY + PRINT SCREEN.

As you can probably guess, you can also type WINKEY + ALT + PRINT SCREEN to capture just the currently focused window. However, this keyboard shortcut displays an Xbox Game Bar notification banner and, even more confusingly, saves the resulting screenshot in a different location, the Captures folder in your us...

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