Let’s suppose you are working on a homework paper and you have found some great information on a web page. You highlight the information and you hit CTRL + C to copy it. Next, you go to your word processing program and you hit CTRL + V to paste it into the document. But what happens? You end up with some weird tables and none of the text matches. Not only that, but now your document is a mess!

Easy Workaround: Open up Notepad, and CTRL + V. In fact, put all the useful text that you find into it. Why? Because Notepad strips all the formatting and that is what is making your homework look like a disaster.

Now you can select all the text you placed into Notepad, CTRL + C to copy or CTRL + X to cut. Now paste into your Word document. The text appears just as your default in your document without any weird formatting. Usually what I do is place all the copied text from the Internet into Notepad before I even go to Word.

There are many variations to Notepad, one Open Source version called Notepad ++ (Available here : http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm) is a free source code editor that is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. It also has Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding and auto completion.