Review of Techsmith's Snagit

On the TechSmith website, www.techsmith.com, Snagit is billed as The Ultimate Screen Capture Tool.  And, in my opinion, after years of non-stop use, it really is.  Using Snagit, you can quickly “create images and videos to give feedback, solve a problem, or show off something cool”.  Snagit empowers you to “communicate efficiently with visuals that give your ideas clarity and help you explain any subject”.  From image, text, and video capture to editing, sharing and organizing graphics, Snagit is peerless, extremely user-friendly and priced to sell, usually less than $40.00 USD.

What Snagit does, Snagit does very well.  My favorite use for Snagit is grabbing, copying and pasting graphics of any source, resolution and shape into PowerPoint presentations.  I prepare data driven spreadsheets, charts, and other graphics from MS Excel, MS Access, MS Word, among other applications.  What I use Snagit for is to grab a part of any digital document and paste the resulting high-resolution image directly onto PowerPoint slides, all in 3-5 clicks of a mouse.  You can also easily make annotations to the the image:

 

Snagit enables you to visually communicate ideas and make your content more engaging, as below (excerpted from http://www.techsmith.com/snagit-customer-stories.html):

Education:

o   Video lessons - easily record and share video lessons with students
o   Research - Save websites or longer web documents with Snagit's scrolling screen capture, snag graphs and images and save the source website, and organize your research by keyword so it's easy to find later.
o   Collaboration - Annotate assignments using Snagit's drawing tools, stamps and callouts, provide video feedback on projects, and use screen captures to create more vibrant presentations.
o   Training - Create easy-to-follow, visual help guides for teachers and students with Snagit's screen capture and annotation tools, or create a video to demonstrate more complex processes.

Business:

o   Communication and collaboration - Snagit is quickest and easiest way to create the images and videos you need and instantly share them with anyone, anywhere. Snagit’s flexibility allows you to customize features to fit the specific needs of your organization and deploy Snagit on a large scale. With Snagit, you can instantly share content across your entire team or with your customer base.

o   Research and record keeping - Capture anything on the screen including online articles, entire web pages, segments of a resource, images, and videos. Highlight and take notes within the captured resource, organize research by keyword, and hide sensitive information with Snagit's blur tool.

o   Training - Show them exactly what you do, and how you do it! Create step-by-step video tutorials or how-to documents for internal and external training. Snagit makes it easy to roll out on-demand videos that can be reviewed by anyone, at any time.

o   Documentation - Looking to add some excitement to you’re documentation? Snagit gives you a wide variety of tools that makes it fast and easy to create engaging, polished content that can be sent directly to Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint.

 

Home:

o   Communication - Whether you're trying to communicate driving directions (see video on left) or wanting to grab a screenshot to share on Facebook or on your blog, Snagit makes it easy to capture and edit images or record a video to better explain an idea. And with your Snagit library, you can quickly find and reuse content you've already created and shared.

o   Research - Looking online for a new home, job, or maybe diving into your family history and genealogy? Snagit makes it easy to keep track of online research. Capture images and videos, annotate with notes, and store and organize content in your Snagit Library. Snagit also works with images from your digital camera or smart phone.

o   Record keeping - In today's digital world, many transactions happen online, and keeping track of receipts and records can be challenging. With Snagit, you can organize your taxes, manage online receipts, and keep account histories in order.

 

If you are in need of manipulating meta data such as graphics, text, and links, Snagit provides an industry leading tool that requires little to no training and at a price affordable to all.  If you have ever been confounded by copying and pasting, Snagit is the ultimate solution.  Plus, Snagit lets you set a profile that enables repeat screen grabs with like results.  You can Snagit images to Camtasia, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social collaboration sites, not to mention to blogs such as WordPress and mind analysis applications such as MindManager.  Bottom line, Snagit is well worth the price for its functionality with PowerPoint alone.