Remember pressing print-screen, opening Paint, pasting, cropping/resizing, labelling, selecting it all, copying, and finally pasting somewhere?  Forget it!

Since Vista, in fact, Windows has had a little application called Snipping Tool hidden away in the Start Menu.  Luckily for us, it’s easy to find – just start typing ‘snipping’ in the Start Menu search and it’ll pop up in the results.

It’s really simple to use.  Upon opening it, you’re good to go grab a portion of the screen already!  Just drag a box around what you want.  The image gets placed into the clipboard, ready for pasting somewhere straight away.  You can also annotate it with a ‘pen’ or highlighter before pasting.  Any scribbles you make are automatically updated into the clipboard, so you can literally just drag a box, highlight, paste.

There are a couple of options and other functions to the tool, so have a look round.  When you only need a quick snip of a screen for a note or showing someone something, this tool is the most useful tool I’ve found in Windows so far.