SNAG-IT
Productivity when you are a solo, or small partnership, consultant often comes down to tools which enhance your ability to create meaningful and powerful presentations, proposals or other forms of communication. One of the best tools I have found in this regard is Snag-It from www.techsmith.com.
Here is an example of what Snag-It’s capture screen looks like; click on it to see a larger image.
You can set it up so that just hitting the “print scr” key on your keyboard launches Snag-It. You then can capture any region of any screen or scrolling screens. The graphic shows that you have pull-down options to save captured images as a jpeg image, a pdf file, etc. Or you can click on any of the Microsoft Office program icons and it will copy the content you have captured directly into a PowerPoint program you may have open for example. The editing tools to the left in the screen shot allow you to underline, add text, erase, etc. You can also print or email what you have captured.
The graphics also shows an icon for a program called MindManager which is another great productivity tool I use (but that is another blog entry).
There are free open source equivalents of this tool but none as feature rich as it is. It cost me $40 when I purchased it a few years ago. I have only touched upon a very small subset of this program’s capabilities. If you are comfortable using productivity tools, then Snag-It is one you ought to add to your tool kit.
I use Snagit constantly. Other features that are very useful are those that enable editing images (adding text, arrows, shapes, etc.)
Other high-productivity tools are Able2Extract and an applet available on iGoogle that converts various Microsoft documents to pdf.
Able2Extract does the reverse, converts pdf files to pretty much any format you want (Word, Excel, Power Point, etc.)
[…] use Snag-It to capture the picture from a website or LinkedIn for example. Click here to see my blog entry on Snag-It. I then save the picture as a .jpg file on my hard disk. Then I […]
[…] promised in an earlier post that I would write about MindManager, one of my favorite productivity tools as a solo consultant. […]