In praise of Notepad

As I'm producing multimedia content for a range of multimedia projects, the software I use will vary and the techniques differ accordingly.

When writing lengthy copy, such as features and press releases, Microsoft Word is essential. I really appreciate its grammar and spell-checking abilities and its thesaurus comes in really handy too. It is an industry standard piece of software and, therefore, editors are happy to receive an email with a Word document attachment.

Word is simply brilliant, but it isn't simple, and it is quite memory hungry. When I want something truly simple, I turn to Notepad. This brilliant little Windows extra has to be one of my most widely used programs and, in my opinion, it is very under-rated. Like an analogue watch, its absolute simplicity is its lasting virtue.

Desktop publishing

When producing copy for desktop-publishing programs, I write the content in Word as normal, but then I save it as a text-only file. This has the benefit of saving the written, while removing all of the Word formatting. Text-only files can then be opened in Notepad or they can be imported into desktop-publishing programs, like Serif PagePlus. With all of the Word formatting removed, you can easily format the text in your own choice of font and line spacing. If you open Notepad and then copy and paste the text into a previously-formatted text box in PagePlus, then the incoming text adopts the same format as the existing text. This makes life easy if you're producing a newsletter or leaflet with lots of text, which all has to be in the same font and style.

Contributions

I also use Notepad to incorporate content from other sources: including email contributions from colleagues. Copying and pasting into Notepad, and then out again, removes formatting allowing you to incorporate additional content quickly and easily without having to keep reformatting the text in Word. The fact that Notepad is a tiny program, taking a fraction of the random access memory (RAM) needed by Word, allows you to open the program alongside other memory-intensive software like Photoshop or a video-editing program. I regularly use Notepad to record caption details when editing pictures in Photoshop or keeping a track of video timecodes or other details when editing video. Notepad is a brilliant little program, and is probably the one I use the most overall. It's open on my PC all the time. Of course, this post was produced in Word and then copied, via Notepad, to my blog-posting software.