Have you discovered these time-saving tricks with Microsoft Notepad?
Quick notes to yourself
I have a notes folder, oddly enough called “Notes”. It has hundreds of useful quick Notepad notes to myself. If I need to refer to one of them often, I right-drag it onto my Windows Desktop (using Windows Explorer, the file manager) and choose “Create Shortcuts Here” from the context menu that appears. That creates a desktop shortcut icon that I can easily double-click on whenever I need that info.
For example, one of those handy Notepad notes has a list of all the URLs that I constantly need when I’m posting messages in the forums and social networks I belong to.
Sometimes you only need a note to yourself for a few minutes or hours, like perhaps some instructions you found on some web site after a Google search. So you simply leave that note minimised on your Windows Taskbar until you need it again – you don’t even need to save it.
Stripping invisible codes
Sometimes I need to copy (Ctrl+C) some text from Microsoft Word and paste (Ctrl+V) it into a web site page or form. But Word uses invisible codes to format your documents and those can cause problems in a web page or form.
You could save your Word document in a “plain text” (*.txt) format to strip out the codes – but I find it faster and more convenient to paste what I copied from Word into Notepad, then select it all (Ctrl+A), copy it (Ctrl+C) and paste THAT into the web page or form. Doing this is a lot faster than it may sound. Since Notepad is a plain text editor, doing this strips out all those invisible Word formatting codes. The only caveat is to be sure Notepad is set to not wrap your text after a certain number of characters. That is, uncheck [Format > Word Wrap]. Sometimes this matters, usually it doesn’t.
Copying email content
I often need to copy something from an email message into a new email message I’m composing. Notepad to the rescue again.
Brainstorming
You never know when a great idea will suddenly hit you. I keep an “Ideas.txt” Notepad file on my desktop, where I can quickly record any new ideas, then quickly get back to what I was working on. Every morning, I review that list and take action.
Online Chat
Some chat software and all forums lack the ability to record your text outside of their own context. So a copy and paste into Notepad can be handy to record important interactions with others or info you want to remember when your not logged in.
Notepad is very handy!
Please tell us – how do you use Microsoft’s Notepad?
Until next time – hope you’ve been taking notes…
_jim coe
