Daljit Dhadwal

Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Zachary Williams

One simple but very handy program that comes with every Windows computer is Notepad. Notepad is an example of a plain text editor. Plain text editors are great for when you need to get rid of formatting from text you’ve copied over from a website. Also, if you need to copy and paste a lot of text between two different programs, sometimes it’s useful to use a text editor as kind of a visible clipboard. One problem that comes up with using Notepad is that when you click somewhere else on the screen, it minimizes to the taskbar. A great alternative to Notepad is a free program called TED Notepad. TED Notepad is a small program that has a ton of features. One of the most useful things it can do is stay visible on the screen even when you click on some other program.

Ted Notepad has a quite a few text editing features too. It’s a good tool to use if you want to write and not get distracted by all of the formatting features in Microsoft Word.