About MS Paint

The Menu Bar

The Menu bar has three items on the left and a Help button at the far right. Paint Button.

First on the left is the Paint Button, which opens a very comprehensive menu, similar to that shown here, plus a list of pictures you’ve recently saved. Most items are self-explanatory, but one—Save as— is very important if you ever want to save a cutout without losing the rest of your picture.

You might like to take a quick look at some of the other items and investigate their uses as well.

Properties dialogue

The Properties dialogue, for instance, will give you information about the picture on which you’re currently working, and let you nominate whether you want to work in centimeters, inches or pixels. (So far, I haven’t managed to make any of these measurements agree in a printed picture, but this may well be due to my lack of experience.)

There’s an option that helps you to set your current picture as your desktop background. You can change this as often as you like.

Home Tab

For nearly everything you do, you’ll want the Home tab to be at the front. The Home tab contains the Ribbon, from which tools and colors are selected. When you’re making use of the View tab, you can flick back and forth between Home and View as often as you need to.

View Tab

Zooming in and out is one of the features that Paint in Windows 7 has improved out of sight! Click on the View tab to bring it to the front and you’ll find a whole set of useful options available. These can be used alone or in conjunction with the Zoom Tool on the Ribbon or the slider on the Status Bar.

Zoom in and Zoom out tools can be clicked repeatedly to get a closer or more distant view.

The 100% option is handy when you’ve finished working in a very zoomed in view. One click and you’re back to normal.

On the Show or Hide part of this tab, you have the option of hiding the status bar. I wouldn’t advise you to do that. The status bar can be useful.

Gridlines are convenient if you want to align shapes accurately.

Rulers? If you like. Turn them on and see what you think.

On the Display section, you can click for Full Screen View. You can also get a Full Screen View by hitting F11. In either case, come back to a normal view by pressing the Esc key.

Thumbnail is only available when you are zoomed in. It lets you see how changes you make are affecting your picture in normal view. So far, I’m finding that the thumbnail cannot always show work on the far right or the bottom of the page.

You can click back and forth between the Home tab and the View tab as often as you like.

The Ribbon

All the tools, the color palette, and most commands are grouped together in the ribbon. The exceptions are Save, Undo and Redo, which are shown at the left end of the title bar, in the Quick Access Toolbar.

If you choose to use a very small window, the ribbon will appear like this. Drop-down arrows below each item will give you access to everything in their menus.

If, however, you use a very large window, you will have many more menu items on display.

There is also an option to minimise the ribbon. If you choose this, the ribbon disappears entirely, but pops into view if you click on the Home tab.

The Clipboard Menu

The clipboard menu offers three options— Cut, Copy andPaste. Only when a selection is active will the Cut and Copy icons show as being ready.

Paste is always active, because you may wish to Paste from a picture on your computer. Say you’ve previously drawn and saved a small

flower and now wish to add it to your present drawing. You’d click the down arrow under Paste, clickPaste from and navigate to the saved picture, click its name and click Open.

You’d be returned to your work space and see the added picture inside a selection rectangle, ready for you to drag to its permanent position.