Cool Utilities Continued (CAD Manager's Toolbox)

To make your work life easier, snag this little gem of a utility.

Graphics Capture/Edit Utility
One of the utilities I couldn't live without is SnagIt from Techsmith. This utility does so much that I can't begin to cover everything, but I'll share a few of the features I use SnagIt for to make creating training materials easy.

SnagIt started out as simply a way to capture graphics from your screen (say a model in Revit) and paste those graphics into Word documents (like a training manual). SnagIt still performs these tasks but has grown to include the following cool functions for graphics capture:

• capture pull-down menus (regular PrintScreen will close the pull down)

• capture specific windows on the screen so you don't have to capture the entire screen and edit later in another application

• store your capture preferences and establish custom hot keys to make it easy for you to use the product

In recent versions SnagIt has evolved into a pretty good markup and editing utility as well. It doesn't do everything that a graphics artist might do with Photoshop, but it does all the basic editing I need. The screen capture below has paper effects, note balloons, and callouts, as just a few examples.

File markup and graphical effects extend SnagIt well beyond simple image capture.

Throw in the capability to save in almost any sort of format you could need and SnagIt is a bargain at $49.95. You may find other utilities that do portions of what SnagIt does for a bit less, but I've not found anything that does as much in one software package, and that means I only need to keep track of one piece of software.

You can download a free trial of SnagIt and check it out for yourself.