Print Screen to the rescue

Here's a quick tip that can save you some trouble: If you're ever having trouble printing out a web page because the website is being buggy, you can always just do a printout of the screen.

I know this because it saved a lot of hair-pulling around here a few weeks ago. We had purchased tickets online for a baseball game and needed to print them out to take to the stadium. Every time we printed them out, the bar code field was blank. And naturally, the bar code was the most important part of the transaction. In fact, the bar code was the only thing that we really needed.

It was clearly visible on the screen, but it just...would...not...print...out.

We called the ticket broker, and the rep said that we weren't the only ones calling in. And they didn't have a solution. We fumed for a while and then someone (actually it was me) had a brilliant idea. Just do a screen print.

I'm working on a Mac, and it was easy peasy. I have mine configured so that if I hold down the Command-Shift-4 keys it lets me drag a box around what I want to capture. Command-Shift-3 takes a picture of the whole screen. You can also set up shortcuts that let you capture just the active window.

You can accomplish the same thing on a PC by using the PrtScrn key if you have one, which makes a copy of the screen that you can then paste into a Word document or an image editor. And I'm sure there other ways to do it too.

But my real point is, don't panic. If you can see something on the screen there's a way to get it printed out.