When you use a Chromebook as your computer, you’ll no doubt need to take a screenshot on your Chromebook at one point or another. Fortunately, there are actually a few very easy ways to take a screenshot on a Chromebook, and today, I’m going to show you how to do all of them.
Prefer to watch a video about how to take a screenshot on a Chromebook? Click here.
How To Take A Screenshot Of The Entire Screen
If you simply want to take a screenshot of everything that’s currently on your Chromebook’s screen, you can very easily do that with a keyboard shortcut.
Just press the ctrl key and the key with the box and lines on it at the top of the keyboard at the same time. (Shown in the picture below.)
And then, your Chromebook will instantly take a screenshot of the entire screen and save it to your downloads folder. And it will also be copied to your clipboard so you will now be able to paste it anywhere you could paste an image if you want.
And you’ll also get a notification letting you know that a screenshot has been taken.
And that’s all there is to it! Pretty simple right?
How To Take A Screenshot Of A Specific Part Of The Screen
If you want to take a screenshot of a specific part of the screen so that (for example) you could take a screenshot of a website you’re on without revealing all the other tabs you have open.
That is slightly harder, but still very easy.
All you have to do is click on the time in the bottom right hand corner.
And then click on the “Screen capture” icon that will be somewhere in this menu.
Now, you’ll see a box appear on the screen with a whole lot of different screen capturing options. And there’ll be a bubble in the center of the screen that says “Drag to select an area to capture”.
So now, if you use your mouse to click and drag over the area you want to take a screenshot of, it will create a highlighted box like this:
Unfortunately that part is a bit hard to explain that part in words, so if you’re a bit confused, you might want to watch the video instead.
And then, you can drag any of the corners of the box to perfect the positioning if you need to, but once you’re happy with it, just click the “Capture” button on the center of the box.
And a screenshot of only that portion of the screen will be saved to your downloads folder.
And that’s all there is to it! While this process isn’t quite as easy as taking a screenshot of the entire screen, it’s still a great way to do it if you only want a specific part of the screen.
How To Take A Screenshot Of A Specific Window
If you want to take a screenshot of a specific window on your screen so that it’s just Google Chrome or just a different app. You could do that by using the last method and dragging the box over the specific window.
But, there’s actually an easier way.
So if you want to take a screenshot of a specific window the easier way, all you have to do is click on the time in the bottom right hand corner just like the other method.
And then, once again, click on the “Screen capture” icon that will be somewhere in this menu.
And now, you’ll again see a box appear on the screen with a whole lot of different screen capturing options. And there’ll be a bubble in the center of the screen that says “Drag to select an area to capture”.
But, rather than dragging, if you instead click on the rectangle icon in the box that appears on the screen.
It will now take a screenshot of whichever window you choose, so if, for example, you hover your mouse over Google Chrome, it will highlight that in blue, and all you have to do is click to take a screenshot of just that chrome window without the bookshelf across the bottom or anything else.
Or, if you hover your mouse over a different app like the calculator, for example, it would highlight just that app in blue.
And then, if you click it would take a screenshot of just the calculator and nothing else and save it to your downloads.
And that’s all there is to it! Now, regardless of what you want to take a screenshot of on your Chromebook, you know how to do it in the best way possible.
There are plenty of Chrome extensions you could install to take screenshots on your Chromebook, and some of them are pretty good. But when Chrome OS has all these awesome screenshotting features built into it, why would you bother with those?
