One of the cool new features of Windows 7 is the snipping tool. If you’ve ever needed to send a screenshot to somebody or you’ve needed to get a small portion of the screen into a jpeg then the standard procedure is to do a print screen, load up paint, paste the image in, crop it, save it and send it! This is all made a whole lot easier with the snipping tool.

Once you load the snipping tool up your mouse cursor turns into a selector tool that will allow you to click and drag to highlight a portion of the screen. Once you’ve done this the snipping tool will automatically paste it into a new window like so:

Once you’ve got the image you get to do some basic editing on it. You have a handy little pencil tool that will allow you to draw or write something onto the image in various different colours. You also get a highlighter tool to highlight certain areas of importance. Check out my masterpiece below:

You can then save your image as a png, gif, jpeg or mht (single file html). Another handy feature is you can send the image direct to your email client.

Little extra programs like this make Windows 7 a very definite improvement over Windows XP (and of course Vista, but that isn’t hard, is it?). The snipping tool will definitely save time for those who frequently have to take screenshots and it will allow you to quickly crop, edit and send the images on without having to load up paint.