Taking a screen shot is an easy thing to do.

Whether you are taking a screen shot in Microsoft Flight Simulator, or any other Windows program, the method is the same. First, you must have on your screen the image you wish to take a screen shot of. Then press the print screen key on your keyboard. This places the image into the memory of the computer. Now you need to save it to a file.

Open any graphics editing program. A high end application such as PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro will produce the best results, but you can also use the Paint program that is a part of Windows. Once the program is running, click paste (usually under the 'Edit' menu.) Your image will now appear as you wanted it to.

It is still possible to make use of screenshots if you don't have a fancy graphics editing program. It is possible to paste them into many common programs such as Word, or even Wordpad which comes with windows.

For many situations, this is sufficient. But sometimes you may have more than one Window open, and only want to have a screenshot of one, or you may have a window that doesn't take up the entire screen, such as the following:

In this situation, it is possible to get a screenshot of only the active window by pressing Alt + Print Screen. So even though more than one application, plus the Windows desktop, are visible, you'll only get what is in the active window in your screenshot. In this case, the screenshot would show Minesweeper.

When saving the file, it is important to choose the file format which will best suit your needs. Saving the screenshot as a Windows bitmap (.bmp) file will usually result in the sharpest, clearest image. However, there are two downsides. The first is that the screenshot can only be viewed or on your computer, or someone else if you send the file to them. The second downside is that the resulting file will be very large. This may not be a problem, but if you want to e-mail it to someone, it may cause problems for the person receiving it. Especially if they have a slow Internet connection. Bitmaps are very common, and almost any graphics program can save to this format.

Another choice is to save the image as a jpeg (more commonly seen as jpg) file. This file type is suitable for uploading to webpages, and also compresses the image, resulting in a smaller file size. There is a slight loss of clarity, but it usually isn't enough to affect the image greatly. JPEGs are also very common, and most graphics programs can also save to the format, including Paint. Prior to Windows 98, Paint could only save to bitmaps, so if you are using Windows 95 or an earlier operating system, you will need special software.

There are a few other common file types you could try to use, such as the Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format (.gif) or Portable Network Graphics (.png) formats. Because of colour, quality and compatibility issues, it is recommended that you avoid these file types when possible.

On the other hand, if you've pasted the screenshot into Word or another similar program, you don't need to worry about the format used to save the picture, but you do still have to save the whole document so all elements will be retained. The native file format (.doc) for Word will allow you to save screenshots as part of a document. However the .doc files created by Word are somewhat different than the .doc documents created using Wordpad. Wordpad will only allow you to save text, other items will be lost. So if you are pasting your screen shots into Wordpad, be sure to save them using the Rich Text File (.rtf) format.

Although this tutorial was written using Windows 98, the methods outlined can be used with any version of Windows.