The snipping tool that’s built in to Windows 10 is likely not a new discovery for you, but as with most applications in Windows, there’s more to it than meets the eye. I’ve been using this tool for many years now and have only recently discovered that there is a delay feature in it.
The basic premise is that this setting allows you to delay the freezing of your screen by up to 5 seconds. The tools default setting is set to that of ‘No Delay’, which means that as soon as you want to take a screenshot, it immediately freezes your desktop as is, only allowing you to capture what is currently displayed.
What’s great about having the option to change this setting to some interval, 5 seconds being the max, is that it now allows you to show something on your
desktop that would normally disappear when you navigate away from it.
For example, I’ve been writing Tuesday Tips for what seems to be a decade now and whenever I wanted to show a screen shot of a menu in a Microsoft application such as Excel, I struggled with getting drop down menus to remain visible. Because, the moment I moved my mouse cursor off of it and over to the snipping tool, the Excel menu would disappear.
Setting the delay feature now allows you to initiate the screenshot first, navigate to the drop down menu, make it visible and then wait for the tool to freeze the screen, thereby capturing what you want to show (as illustrated in the red box to the left).
