Sunday 18 February 2007

Windows Vista - the new MSPaint

The new version of MSPaint in Windows Vista ROCKS!

Why?

How many of our clients have any form of image editing software on their machines other than MSPaint? Generally, for most clients not directly connected to some sort of publishing industry, it is unlikely.

So, when I need to create a quick How-To manual while on-site, I have to use the XP Pro based MSPaint. Trimming images from screen shots using this process is painful at best. After so many years of doing it, I pretty much know the default dpi x dpi of the various message windows and pop-ups! ;*)

The kewlest new feature, yes it is deliberately misspelled, is the CROP feature! No more CTRL-E cut the width and height, rotate, CTRL-E, cut the width and height, and so on, and so on! Throw in a whole bunch of CTRL-Zs to step back too! Even with a good idea of the height and width of a screen shot item it would generally take three or four edits to get each side cropped!

On Vista, I click on IMAGE, CROP. Then, I drag my mouse from opposite corner to opposite corner of just the item I want, Right Click, select crop, and voila! Save and done...Just saved myself oodles of time for some of the more complex quick Help Manuals that I sometimes need to create on the spot.



This one feature is definitely a step up!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

my steps for cropping out a window from a screencapture:
1) paste screen to paint
2)drag freshly pasted pick until desired window's top and left are at the top and left extremes of paint window
3)click white space on the way down to bottom right corner
4)drag bottom right corner to bottom right of desired window

very quick and works in all paints.

Anonymous said...

Maybe I misunderstood what you were trying to say but individual windows can be put into the clipboard by pressing alt+print.
No cropping necessary.

Have a nice day,

Rob

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Two very excellent points to fine tune the use of Paint!

Awesome.

Thanks folks!

Philip

Anonymous said...

Yes, but there are a lot of new bugs in Vista's MS Paint. Try to select a piece of an image and rotate it. If you've selected a "skinny" area, it will cut off most of the rotated element. So, for example, if you want to rotate a line, you have to drag a square-shaped selection box around the line large enough for the entire line to rotate within. Very annoying.