Chuck The Geek.com

Digital scratchpads and collection tools

September 4th, 2008 by Chuck Sharp

If you spend a lot of time on the PC, you really need a good way capture bits of text randomly. A text editor such as Windows Notepad, Notepad++, or Editpad is ideal for this. The trick is that it needs to be quickly available when it’s needed. As I mentioned in previous post, Autohotkeys work well for this because you can assign a hotkey, like Win+N to automatically pull up your editor. Once up, you can paste the text or write your note. Really, try a Autohotkeys+Notepad combination. It will come in handy all the time, I promise.

On a related note, some things don’t paste well into a text editor, although you’d be surprised what does. To cut and paste weirdly formatted stuff from a website, like a table, select and copy the whole table (plus some extra above and below it), and paste it into Word. Word handles that stuff really well in my experience. If you then want to convert it to text, you can copy and paste it to your text editor from there.

Entry Filed under: PC Basics, Productivity