Some of you may recall my endorsement of a little free application called WinSnap a while back that I have been using for months to create the Snapshots of all of my charts & spreadsheets.

At the time, all I was looking for was some way of quickly capturing a small portion of the screen instead of the whole window as happens when using PrntScreen. WinSnap met those criteria and you couldn’t beat the price!

But I’ve recently progressed to the point of wanting to edit some of these charts and pictures. Be it by adding additional trendlines, arrows, or annotations. So what I have been doing is saving the picture then opening up MS Paint, editing it further, then re-saving the picture. It got the job done but could be VERY time consuming if there were a lot of charts I wished to analyze.

So I did a search to see what programs were out there that would allow me to accomplish these 2 tasks (Picture Capturing & Picture Editing) simultaneously. Then someone over at the TradeStation help forum recommended SnagIt, and boy am I ever grateful!

It has all of the basic picture capture features of WinSnap up at the top (User-Defined Region, Window, & Full Screen). But what makes me qualify it as the “Best Little Trading Tool Ever” are the following features:

SnagIt Editor: After taking a picture, a preview page appears in the editor that allows you to add any desired annotations or graphics before saving
Scrolling Window to PDF: Will convert an scrolling page to a .pdf document. Very handy for saving good articles
Record Screen Video: Allows you to create a video (with sound) of whatever you do on the screen. Great for educational videos!

Those are just the features that I’ve found a use for as of yet as there are many others included; But these more than adequately suit my meager needs at the moment. SnagIt is shareware and you can:

and try it out FREE for 30 days before it will ask you to register the product. I’m still in my free trial but for $40, you can’t beat its functionality.

FYI: As this is the first shareware product I’ve plugged I feel it necessary to state that I am in no way affiliated with SnagIt nor will I profit whatsoever if you choose to try out their product, I’m just one happy trying to help out other traders who may be looking for something similar.