If you’ve got friends or family members who regularly call for help with their computer, do this the next time you visit their homes: Take a screen shot of their desktop.

You can use that picture to give them precise directions to a particular program. For example, you can say “third icon from the top on the right of the screen” instead of making your friend read through a long list of file names. (They will need to refrain from moving things around on the desktop, which most beginners don’t seem to do, anyway.) To do a screen grab in Windows, hit the Print Screen button, open the Paint program and hit the Ctrl and P keys, then save the image to a flash drive. On a Mac, hit the Shift, Command and 3 keys, then copy the “Picture 1” file that will appear on the desktop to a flash drive.