Screen Capture

One of the best things about SolidWorks is that improves its capabilities and utilities based on customer feedback and understanding how they work, even the little things they do on a daily basis. Sometimes, those enhancement ideas come from our internal developers and the day-to-day things that that they do. One of those ideas came recently from our Manager of Graphics,

Ron Bates

who constantly needed to quickly take screen shots of SolidWorks for his associates and his own development work but did not want to include the SolidWorks interface or the span of his multi-monitor system.

Many users have long been familiar with The Print Screen key that exists on most keyboards near the scroll lock and insert keys. This is a quick way to capture your windows screen and copy it to the clipboard. Alternately you can hold down your <Alt> key while clicking the Print Screen button to have only the currently select Window copied to the clipboard. Ron did one better with the Screen capture icon. It behaves much like the Print Screen with <Alt>  key but it excludes the SolidWorks user interface and only captures the SolidWorks window (viewport).

This can be a tremendous time saver, especially when needing to quickly capture a view of your SolidWorks model and paste it to another document or to a photo editing program like PhotoShop.

The Screen Capture function can be found in SolidWorks 2007 and later just underneath Menu/View at the top of your SolidWorks interface.

Fielder