Support Tips for Administrators
Being a project engineer for an outsourcing company, much of my time is spent working with system administrators rather than users but like users system administrators, need help from time to time. So here are a couple of tips related to support that I think are worth sharing (or re-sharing for those already in the know):
Alt + Print Screen takes a screenshot of the window or dialog box currently in focus rather than the complete desktop as Print Screen alone does. This is a simple one and I thought that everyone would know this, but I’m still surprised at the number of screenshots I get in an e-mail that shows the whole desktop and not just the dialog box with the error message. On occasion Outlook resizes the screenshot and I then have to squint at the tiny little dialog in the middle of the picture. Alt-Print Screen saves the day and makes the dialog nice an easy to read, but then what about:
Ctrl + C to copy the text in a dialog box. Yes it’s true; you can copy the text straight out of a dialog box. So you can turn this:
into this:
[Window Title]
Notepad
[Main Instruction]
Do you want to save changes to Untitled?
[Save] [Don’t Save] [Cancel]
How cool is that? This works most of the time, however you’ll come across a number of applications where this does not work, Microsoft Office being one of them. Tristan has more on this tip at Ctrl+C In A Message Box Does What!?.
