Why Is Notepad Such A Valuable Tool

Every person who has a regular PC has the program Notepad on their computer. Most people don’t know about it; those who do rarely think about using it. And yet, it’s probably the most versatile program on your computer.

Notepad’s main use is as a word processing program. There are definitely fancier programs out there, including Wordpad, which is also on your PC. Still, it’s very effective as a word processing program. You can write anything you want to, using any font, but it doesn’t have spell check. It will also save everything by default as a text file; you may or may not want to do that, but at least it can be used for that.

Another way it can be used is as a HTML writing program. The reason it’s good for that is that it doesn’t convert characters to things they’re not meant to be, unlike some word processing programs. If you know how to write HTML, you can write your entire code in the program, and link it to your browser so you can see what you’re writing as a test. You can open it in your browser as a text file, then when you’ve completed writing everything you can save your file as a HTML document. That’s one of the flexibilities of Notepad; you can save your program in any format you want to, with any extension, and it will stand as it’s supposed to.

That brings up something else it can do, which is open any extension type. Some types aren’t meant to show anything, but those that can be opened up so you can see the information inside works well with Notepad. It also allows you to save any changes in that same format, which other word processing files won’t. So, if you had to open a .ini file, you would tell Notepad to look for all files, open the one you want, make changes, then just hit Save and it’ll save the file the way you want it to be saved, without adding anything extra to the file.

One last thing it’s good for is if you need to copy any information from a web page into a different word processing program without any problems. Say you want to copy a paragraph from a website into MS Word, for instance. Two things could happen; one, it will come into your word processing program using a different font than what you’re using in your document, which means you have to highlight it and change it all over. Or two, it may lock your document up because it’s unsure how to handle the information, which might have a link embedded somewhere within it.

With Notepad, you can copy anything into it and it’ll accept it as just plain text. Then you can copy whatever you’ve put into Notepad and paste it into your Word document, and it’ll look just like the rest of your document; you won’t notice any changes, and it won’t bring over any hidden links. The same goes for spreadsheet programs such as Excel.

Notepad might just end up being a lifesaver in many circumstances; that is, if more people knew about it.