If you’ve been taking screen shots the caveman way (Fn + PrntScr perhaps?), then it’s time to upgrade a little and make your life (and the lives of those you work with) much, much easier. Jing is a screenshot and screencast program from TechSmith that has become an almost indispensible part of my daily work. Versatile, easy to use, produces professional results… and it’s free. What’s not to love?

Jing is a small, unobtrusive program that allows you to take and edit great looking screenshots with just a click of the mouse. You can take caps of exactly what you want, without sacrificing image quality, and then you can doctor them up and share them quickly and easily with whoever you want. When you edit, you can add arrows and text, highlight an area, put a box around an important part you want to call attention to, and more. Jing takes basic screencast videos, too, which can also be easily shared.

The potential uses for the small business owner and entrepreneur here are many and varied. For example, you can use it to collaborate on your website’s new redesign, or instantly show your web designer that bug you found. When you use the screencast feature, you can make video and audio recordings of what you’re doing on your own screen in order to teach someone else how to navigate through a process or use a piece of software. The screenshots and screencasts Jing produces can also be funneled into TechSmith’s premium editing software Camtasia and Snagit for even further editing.

When you’re done taking one, you can save it to your own computer or tell Jing where you want to send it for further sharing, like Screencast.com or Flickr. There is also a fairly inexpensive pro version of Jing available, which gives you greater functionality, like the ability to record via your webcam and toggle back and forth between your webcam and your screen to give your viewers a more immersive experience.

All in all, this is an exceptionally handy tool that I highly recommend. You’ll find a ton of uses for it, and it’s so easy to work with that even the least tech savvy among your employees should have no trouble making it work. Give it a try, see what you think.