Years ago, back in the golden age of Life and Look magazines many people enjoyed the simple pastime of keeping a scrapbook. This was in a period when people had time in their day for something called a “hobby” because they did not have 200 TV channels to watch and 2 hour daily commute to work. Clipping and pasting pictures and news articles into a book was a strangely satisfying way to put current events into a semblance of order and to create a memory book of the time.
Windows 7 has a great little program called the Snipping Tool. The Snipping Tool can cut any size piece of a text, a drawing or a picture and then paste the piece into a Word document, PowerPoint slide or even an email. It is just like making a scrapbook page or a collage except that the paste doesn’t make your fingers stick together.
The snipping tool can save your “snips” as a Portable Network Graphic file (PNG), a GIF, a JPEG or an MHT. Snips are saved to the Clipboard and are easily imported into another file type. Snips can be edited further with a highlighter, colored pen or eraser in the Snipping Tool window and then pasted. I made a Word document that included snips from photos, text from a PDF document, and a portion of a graphic from a web page.
The Snipping Tool is a simple but fun to use and could easily become addictive. Use it to liven up your emails, presentations, journal entries etc. Or perhaps you could start that scrapbook you never had time to keep.
-Mark
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