How to Insert Screenshot in Office Windows and Mac?

Many colleagues working in organization prepare documentation. The simple way to make documentation is using Word documents, Excel workbooks or PowerPoint presentations. Some time, people also send instructions in Outlook email directly. When preparing instructional documents, you may need to insert the screenshots for illustration purposes. For example to take a photo of your screen and insert in the document. This is particularly interesting for error messages for visual designing. In this article, let us explain how to insert screenshot in Office applications in Windows and Mac.

Related: How to take screenshot in Google Chrome?

Inserting Screenshots in Office Windows

You can insert screenshots using default menu from Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. For example, open your document and switch to the “Insert” tab. Select the “Screenshot” button in the “Illustrations” group. Word automatically collates all open windows as possible sources, except the minimized windows.

You can select the screen to insert on your document directly. If you want to select specific region of the open window then select “Screen Clipping”. This will change the cursor to cross hair style and allow you to select the region from the active application.

By holding the left mouse button down you can define the preferred screenshot section. On releasing the mouse button, the selected section is copied into the Word document. Word will automatically insert the selected region as an image on your document.

Similar to Word, you can open Excel workbook and insert screenshots by navigating to “Insert > Screenshot” option.

You can follow the same procedure in other Office applications like PowerPoint and Outlook.

Editing a Screenshot

If you are not satisfied with your current screenshot, you can edit it retrospectively. Office applications adds the so-called “Picture Tools” for post-editing the graphic.

• Selecting the screenshot will show you “Picture Tools” with “Format” menu. This “Format” menu lets you edit the graphic in various ways.
• For example, you can change the outline by choosing different style from the “Picture Style” drop down.

You can play around to beautify the screenshot using various formatting options available. After inserting the screenshot, you can select and click on the small “Layout Options” that shows next to the picture. This will allow you to align the picture position and wrap the text as per your need.

Other Options to Insert Picture in Office Windows

Windows has plenty of other options and tools to insert screenshots in your Office documents.

• If you have image file in PNG or JPEG format, simply select the file and copy it. Go to your Office document and paste the image as a screenshot. You can format the picture similarly as explained above.
• Use “Print Screen” button to copy the screen image to clipboard and paste on your document. Also try out “Alt + Print Screen” and “Control + Print Screen” for capturing screens.
• Use the default “Snip & Sketch” (Snipping Tool in older versions) to capture the screen as a picture. Later, you can copy and paste the picture in your documents.

Inserting Screenshots in Office Mac

Unfortunately, Office applications do not have “Screenshot” option on Mac Office 365. You have to insert picture or capture the screenshot using Mac “Screenshot” utility to capture the screen.

• Press “Command + Shift + 5” to open the Screenshot app in Mac.
• Click on the “Options” and select “Clipboard” from the list.
• Now, you will see the camera icon for capturing the entire screen or only the required potion.
• Capture the screen which will be saved in your clipboard.
• Open Microsoft Word or any other Office document.
• Press “Command + V” to insert the screenshot from the clipboard.

You can paste the screenshot from the clipboard in any applications like Excel, PowerPoint including the iWord apps like Pages.

Formatting Screenshot in Mac

Similar to Windows, Mac Office pack also offers picture formatting tool for editing your screenshot inside the application.

• Select the inserted screenshot to see an additional menu item named “Picture Format”.
• Use sidebar formatting options and the menu items to adjust the picture.

Other Options in Mac Office

You can also insert pictures from your computer by going to “Insert > Pictures”. You can select the images from Photos app, search online or choose an image file from your Mac.