Notepad. Ever lasting and ever useful. What can't you do in notepad? Well here's 2 things you might not have known you could do.

Use notepad as a diary!

There are 2 ways to use notepad as a diary. You can do it the automated way - or the manual way.

Manual way

Open notepad and save the text file to somewhere. Now that you've got the text file saved, we can start making a diary. On a new line press "F5" to insert the time and date - you can easily delete parts of this as it comes out as text. Press enter and type in your diary entry. Do it every day, every other day, once a week or any other interval of time you fancy

Automated way

Doing it the automated way saves time in the long run - but not much if I'm honest. Here's how:

1. Open notepad
2. Type ".LOG" at  the top of your document
3. Save it and close it
4. Open it

You'll notice the time and date have been inserted. As long as you have ".LOG" at the top of the file, every time you open it the time and date will be added on a new line for you; all you have to do is write your log between the lines!

Make notepad open a file by default!

Here's another thing I bet you didn't know notepad could do. It's really very simple too. Start off by creating a new shortcut on your desktop (Right Click -> New -> Shortcut) to open up the shortcut creation dialogue.

In the location box, type "C:\Windows\Notepad.exe". If your storage device that holds Windows isn't the C drive, change the letter to the right one. After this, type a space then the location of the file you want to open. For example "C:\Windows\Notepad.exe C:\MyTextFile.txt".

Click "Next >", name the shortcut and press "Finish". Now, every time you open that shortcut, it will open notepad with that file open.

I know this idea seems stupid because you can just double click a text file to open it anyway - but combine it with the article I wrote 2 days ago on scheduling tasks and you can have your computer open up your diary for you at a certain time every day.

I hope this article has helped you. Browse around Daily Tip for more interesting articles.