There are tools (aps etc) for capturing all kinds of stuff that you can't get with a Ctl-C, but unfortunately there are a lot of file formats that block (or just don't support) copying and you may need a different ap for each of them. You also have to identify what program/format is in front of you and remember what tool works with which of them.

I seldom run into anything that I can't steal capture with common tools I already have in Windows/Office and my essential others, and don't care to be bothered with lots of stuff I don't use often enough to deserve space on the computer.

The comment about not being able to snatch one kind of file was just the straight line for the story. The information that a "wand" scanner actually did capture an image when I "scanned the monitor face" was the punch line.

A NEW OBSERVATION very recently came from a question from TSOAMP (The Source of All My Problems) when she had trouble extracting an image from a document that our friend attached to an email.

NEW INFO 1: The file attached to the email was a .wps. This is an old format once used by Microsoft, and we've had threads here about people who had a bunch of them and couldn't open them. (How our friend is making new .wps files is still a mystery(?)) When I tried to open the document in Word, my Word informed me that I needed "a newer conversion filter" and gave me a link to where to get it. The Microsoft site said the new filter was only good for Word 2010, but it installed and worked just fine in my Word 2007. Anyone having a problem with .wps files may find the problem solved by an update to their Office Conversion Filter kit - which has been updated, apparently recently.

NEW INFO 2: Inserting pictures into Word documents is simple. Getting a picture that's been "inserted" into a Word document captured so you can use it elsewhere has always been something of a problem. With the .wps opened in Word (and saved as a .doc)we tried just copying it to the clipboard to paste it into a different program. This didn't work because the other program(s) don't recognize the "Clipboard" that Word puts the Copy in. We did find, however, that if you EXIT WORD after copying, Word will inform you that you put something on the clipboard (that you didn't paste anywhere) and will ask if you want to save it to use elsewhere. If you click YES, it apparently moves the Copy from the Office Clipboard to a System TEMP, and the other programs can access it there. This is a rather clumsy process, especially if there are several pics in the same source document, but it does work (in our versions). (Someday I may poke around to see if there's a simpler way, but it's been on my list for quite a while already.)

This last info is probably less helpful as how to do something than as something new about how Office works (i.e. the temp space for Clipboard is different than Windows TEMP space).

The "Snip" tool is still in newer versions of Word, but so far as I've been able to tell it's essentially a screen capture, so it works anywhere that Ctl-PrtScn works, but not anywhere else so far as I've seen. It doesn't work (or didn't the last time I tried it) in a few places where an ordinary PrtScn (with or without Ctl or Alt) does work, and neither of them works in some places.

John