Screenshots and more
One of my pet peeves is a sloppy screenshot. I shudder if I’m sent a screenshot in a professional document that’s blurry, too zoomed out or stretched out of ratio. I cringe if I see a presentation with a screenshot that includes a stack of irrelevant extra info – it’s not necessary to include your Amazon shopping browser tabs or to advertise how many unread Yahoo emails you have.
As a result, I like a good screenshotting tool – one that allows you to accurately pick your screenshot regions. For years I’ve flitted, most recently with Greenshot, however, I’ve found a new favourite – ShareX. It’s open source, so free to use, and although it shares some of the same code as Greenshot it improves on it in a number of ways.
It has two features that I’ve found hugely useful – scrolling capture and OCR.
Scrolling Capture
Scrolling Capture is useful in web pages that are taller than your screen window. Previously I’d have to take multiple screenshots then stitch them together. Messy. ShareX does the scrolling and stitching for you.
OCR
OCR is reading text from an image. Retyping is time-consuming so this saves wasted effort, scanning through the image for words on your behalf and giving you the results as text.
Immediate Practical HCM Cloud Use-Case
Earlier today I had to produce a document showing the processes that we have scheduled. The grid in the Scheduled Processes page was about 3x screen heights high and there is no download to Excel/detach button. I was faced with either scrolling up and down and retyping the process names or having to find the back-end table, and neither would be particularly quick.
Enter ShareX. I activated it, clicked ‘scrolling capture’, clicked on the Scheduled Processes grid and away it went. It gave me a single image with the entire grid in. Then I activated ShareX again and clicked OCR, pointed it at the image and it gave me a table containing the text. Exactly what I needed in less than 60 seconds.
Fusion Tipster 