Cleaning with Notepad

One of my many (and increasing by the day) New Year's Resolutions is to blog things that I find useful. This is a simple enough trick which I use rather a lot, but you might not know it. 

If you move data around from one program to another using the clipboard you often find things attached to the data that you don't want. Sometimes text can have HTML wrapped round it, or perhaps there is some formatting that you want to get rid of. I use Notepad to do this. Drop the text into Notepad and then copy it back out again. Notepad is only good for text, and so it will normally get rid of any unwanted data. It is even easier if you use the keyboard shortcuts:

Click in your Notepad window, CTRL+A to select all the existing text in the Notepad window, CTR+V to paste over it  the text you want to "clean", CTRL+A to select the cleaned and then CTRL+C to copy it. 

There are probably much neater ways of doing this, but it works and you can find Notepad on most any machine.