What’s In Your Techdeck? – SnagIT 2020 Cool Features

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Episode Transcript

So hello everyone. It’s Digital Dave and today we’re going to be talking about an exciting new product with new features and this is one of my favorite products to have in my techdeck. I think one of the things that everybody should do is really evaluate their techdeck on which products they’re using and which products they’re not and which products are very effective for them for efficiency in getting things done.

The program is Snagit. We’ve actually done a review on this one before and the only reason that I’m doing this again today is that they have some cool new features in the Snagit 2020 version which I just downloaded.  I’ve got Small Business Stacey here with me today and I’m going to walk through with her some of these awesome new features that you should be taking advantage of as well, particularly if you do any kind of documentation for your customers, clients or patients.

I’m almost thinking about using this to create infographics and you’ll see what I mean when I’m done showing you this. Let’s start with some of the new features in the Snagit 2020 version that I just think are a home run as far as delivering documentation that really pops in the new version here. They’ve actually added an ability to use templates to put your images. Before you can combine images, but you kind of had to line everything up and put it all together to make it look nice, put your steps in there and so on and so forth, which actually made it a lot more work. I’m going to show you how these templates work. The second thing, which I cannot do today because we’re recording this screen as to make a video from images and you can string together images and make a transitional video, and you can actually do this inside of the templates as well, which is really, really cool.

I don’t want to do too many features today, but just some basic features. And a third one that I’ll do, that a lot of people don’t use is using Snagit, is to grab text from images. So we’ll cover those three things today, let’s start with templates. So in templates, you have the opportunity to choose from some standard templates that come with the out of the box in Snagit 2020. And these are certainly,  pretty nice templates and you could use any of these. So let’s say I want to make a step by step document, right? I want to show somebody how to do something. I’m just going to pick this template. I’m going to click create here. And what it’s going to do is it’s going to give me kind of like an overview template, right? And you literally just work from this template and you build it out.

So I’ll go in here and I might say title, what do I want my title to be? I want my title to show Stacey how this works. And you can move these around, you can design it how you are. You want to after you’ve already done it, you can re-number it. You can add new images to it and you can re kind of like a table of contents or a glossary I suppose. One of the things they do is they stamp this stuff down here by created by who, on what date and made with, and of course they want to get their advertising in there. And you could certainly just remove that if you want to. And you could go in here and pop your logo on here? You could make it look like you own this. So from there, you kind of have your step-by-step document here. So I’m going to show Stacey, we did a video recently with Bob Burg. If you don’t know who Bob Burg is, he’s the Go-Giver. So I’m going to just grab some images that I snagged from that to make a blog post. And we’re going to kind of just drag these into the areas here. You can see it’s pretty easy. All right.

It takes a while to grab it to get the handle. Kind of have to hold it down for a second on the image. So I only have four images here. Ah, it’s good enough and we’ll show you some great statistics from one of our campaigns. How about that? There you go. 362 impressions in 23 clicks. So anyway, I’ve just made a step-by-step document and what I would do now is I’d probably come up here to the areas where I describe what this step-by-step does, right? I’m making a step by step and you could clearly see how you could use this as an infographic, right? I mean you could definitely make some cool infographics with this. So I want to put here and I’m going to put there and I’m going to put everywhere.

Isn’t that a pretty nice quick and easy way to do step-by-step documentation and structural documentation? Anything that involves a process, you can add as many of these as you want. Now here’s, here’s something that’s really cool. This is what I want to show you next is that, and I bought this and I hadn’t bought this before, is something called Snagit assets. And with Snagit assets, you have the ability to go outside of these standard templates that and things like that, that you want to add. So I went in and I added a bunch of emojis into this thing. So if I come over here to my stamps, I’ve got emojis or I think it’s smiley faces and people, I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of these, these came from Snagit assets. So they’re pretty fun, and so I could come over here and I could say, we like Bob but we want to put this next to Stacey. Oh, I don’t need two of them anyway.

I got to click off of it and then click on this one and then grab the handles. And if I want to make it smiley, I can make a smiley. So those are stamps. It’s not what I wanted to show today. What I want to show today is that they have a whole mess of assets and these are just some of the ones that you can grab. But one of the things they have as assets is templates. The way you go there is you can do create an image from a template and one of the options it says is download more templates. I’m going to skip over to where that is directly. I mean I could click on it but it would just open up another browser window and we can see here’s the list and I just went into the templates that are available. These are some frame kind of templates, with a lot of times you like to put things inside of a computer, right? So I could grab this template right here, basic monitor landscape. I can click open in Snagit and it tells me I have the wrong version, which is okay, but it still works. So anyway, I was able to put this template inside Snagit 2020, and now I can do create, and if I go back over to my Snagit, which it doesn’t, it’s weird, it doesn’t really bring you back there. But it has pulled that template in. So now I can literally use this template here. I could put a big smiley face right in the middle there.

Yeah, we can come up here to the title and I just click on the arrow because I need to go, Stacey is happy, and again I’d probably get rid of this down here. Oh, I’m still on stamps. And this is just some of the quarks of Snagit that you get used to after a while. So I’ll click on favorites so that it doesn’t do that. And then I’ll click on this and you have to highlight it first and you click edit and you can remove this. And again you could put an image on there. So if I want to put an image in the background, that’s society, I want to put this here. I could drag this still in there and the smiley face would be on top of the image. And again, it’s a great way to represent … you can even make images from this. And of course with Snagit, you can do file, save as, and you can save this as many types of different types of image files you can do JPEGs, so on, so forth. Pngs, PDFs, so you’re creating images out of these that you can then send to people. So that’s two of the things that I wanted to show you today in Snagit that I think are pretty nice features and you should use.

And the last one that a lot of people don’t use, which I absolutely think is one of the best things ever, is the ability to literally capture text from an image. So here we have an image, right? And say, I want to grab this text. I don’t want to type all that. That’s way too much work for me. If you come up here to your Snagit quick snag button, and you look below it, there’s a thing that says grab text. If you click on grab text, it’s going to ask you to highlight whatever it is. Now, unfortunately, it’s not going to let me snag my snag. I’m going to have to do this from an image somewhere else. So I’m going to back out of here and I’m going to just go to something that has text on it and let’s just say that’s let’s do some Google images.

Let’s do some quotes. Yeah, this will illustrate it pretty well. Quotes on dreams, how about that? That works. And they always have these images down here that are people who have made quotes for things. So I’ll click on this image here and I could do it right from there. I want that quote from Colin Powell. I wanna, put that into a document.

If I click on my grab text from the quick snag button, okay, and highlight that area. Yeah, it’ll automatically say grabbing text. And it didn’t do a very good job on this one. I apologize to you. That is not normally what I get. And it may be because this text here has a shadow on it. So I’m gonna try a different one here. Let’s try this one here. “The future belongs to those who believe in dreams, the beauty of their dreams”. – Eleanor Roosevelt. Let’s try that one. And normally it’s pretty accurate. Sometimes I have to fix a letter or two and it really kind of depends on the size of it. This may actually be too big. I might actually have done better by taking it from the small one. All right, so this one worked. All right? And again you can’t always use it directly from here, but you can copy this, paste this in notepad, take out all the sizing and all the font stuff in there and paste it into whatever you want to document or into your website with nothing in it.

So those, the grab text feature, has been there always, or at least for a long time. But the thing I really like about Snagit is not just the templates, but I really think this assets thing is pretty cool. So if you come over here into their new assets, they have stamps, they have photos, the photos are okay. Most people have their own photo library. But you get them, you get a bunch of free photos and then you get your templates and they have different types. So you have a timeline set of templates, which again if you want to present something as a timeline, it’s a pretty quick and easy way to create a timeline maybe for you’re going to plop this into a PowerPoint presentation or something. Make it look nice.

So those are just some new features that I’ve got to play with so far in Snagit 2020 and that’s pretty much what I wanted to cover today. One is you need to have a great techdeck. And one of my favorite tools without a doubt for creating documentation is Snagit 2020. This is Digital Dave, signing off till next time (and yes all these images on this page were created from SnagIt 2020).