Notepad is also helpful for stripping text formatting when you copy content from Web pages into your own business files. To open Notepad quickly, you can create a shortcut for it on your desktop.

Now let's say that we wanted to have Notepad automatically open a particular file every time it launches. To do this, we would add the name of the file to be opened as an argument to Notepad.

In order to make the list easy-to-edit, I created a BAT file that opens the HTML page with Notepad ready to be edited. Here's what Denis' todo.html file looks like.

Despite its slim profile and Windows 3.1-style interface, Notepad is a tool that Windows users have come to know and love, using it for all manner of tweaking, quick editing, and other tasks. The ...