One of the features that Wordles have is the ability to share them with others. When you create the Wordle, one of the options is to save your masterpiece to the public gallery. Just before you save, you'll get this warning.
That can be a little scary for some folks, particularly if it's for an assignment and there might be wrong answers in there! So, what do you do?
Here's a simple suggestion. Create your Wordle. In this case, I'm just going to provide the name to my Delicious account and have Wordle create one for me.
Now, I could go ahead and save it, but it's just a picture on the screen, right? Windows has this incredibly useful key labelled "Print Screen". Let me press that. What happens next is that Windows will take a picture of the entire screen. It looks like this (scaled down to fit into this space)
Meh. There's a lot of extra stuff on the screen. I suppose I could bring it into a photo editing program and do some work to it. Photoshop Elements or Fireworks are great for that functionality. But, hello, in the bottom left corner is a button labelled "Open in Window". I'm going to try that.
This looks promising. The Wordle itself is displayed in a new window. Notice that I'm saying "Wordle" and not "image". The Wordle is actually a Java display that looks like an image. If it was an image, we could just right click and save it to the hard drive.
But, let's use another feature of Windows. Make sure that the Wordle is on top of everything else and hold down the Alt key while pressing Print Screen. This time, instead of taking a picture of the entire screen, a picture of the top most window is taken. This may be closer to what you really want. Notice that most of the extraneous content is gone.
We're now getting to the good stuff. Just the content. The final step may be to take this image into your favourite image editing program to crop out the border.
