Grab, save and sort text from websites

Start by going to http://quotepad.info either by entering this address into your browser or by clicking the link in the intro. When the site loads, click the Download link (the software was on version 2.2 when we visited) and choose Save from the File Download dialogue box. At the next screen choose a location for the downloaded file and then click the Save button. It’s only a small file, so it will only take a moment to download to your PC.

Quotepad comes as a compressed file but Windows knows all about these, so find the file and double-click it. When the window opens, find the Setup icon and double-click that. Ignore any security warnings and click Run and, when the wizard starts, follow the prompts, accept the defaults and the licence agreement (there’s an option to install Quotepad on a USB drive if you want) and then click the Finish button. Choose the correct language, put a tick in the ‘Do not show again’ box and click OK.

After a moment, the Quotepad window appears. By default, it’s placed almost at the top of the right-hand side, snapped to edge of the Desktop. When you click off it, it will almost disappear, leaving a slim orange bar right on the edge of the screen. Roll the mouse pointer over the bar and the window will pop right out again. It’s possible to type notes directly into the window from scratch or clip them from a website. Let’s start with that.

Here we’ve navigated to a website about tents because we’re planning a camping holiday. We’ve found some interesting information about a lightweight tent that we would like to come back to, so we can just highlight the text with the cursor and then press the Shift, Ctrl and Q keys at the same time to copy the highlighted text into a new Quotepad note. Next, we can click in the empty subject line and type in a title, for example ‘Camping ­ Tarptent’ and then click OK to complete the new note.

Keep on adding clips from different websites or just double-click on the top note, which is a placeholder, and type in a new one. It helps to give each note a descriptive title –­ all the notes about our holiday include the word ‘Camping’. Change the height of the Quotepad window by dragging it up or down with the mouse. As the number of notes increases, the program adds a scroll bar. To display only notes that relate to a particular topic, click the magnifying glass and type the title into the empty Filter box like this.

Using the Filter command like this also allows you to display only those notes that contain the search word. Here, for example, we’ve started to type in ‘hammock’ and Quotepad has hidden all the notes except the one that we clipped from a hammock-camping website. Hover the cursor over the web link icon at the bottom right-hand corner of the note and click it. When the website address appears in a pop-up window, click that and the relevant web page will load a new tab in the web browser.

Quotepad also makes it easy to add alarms to particular notes. Start by clicking the pushpin icon in Quotepad’s title bar to ‘pin’ it to the Desktop and then open the menu by clicking the arrow at the top left-hand corner. Choose New reminder from the menu and then, when the dialogue box opens, set a date and time for the alarm as well as giving it a subject and some descriptive text. Quotepad supports both one-off and repeat alarms. Click the OK button when finished.

And here’s the alarm we just set, popping up over a Word document. Alarms will be displayed whether or not Quotepad is ‘pinned’ to the Desktop and automatically jump to the top of any other open windows, no matter what other programs are running. Alarms can be snoozed by picking a new time from the dropdown menu, edited by clicking the Change reminder button or acknowledged by clicking the OK button, which will dismiss the alarm and close the dialogue.

A couple of other things before we finish. Open the menu again and this time choose Settings. From here it’s possible to change whether Quotepad starts with Windows, whether it’s accessible from the Notification Area down at the bottom right, set up the key combination for grabbing text off web pages and so on. It’s also worth clicking the Main Window tab and maybe changing the colour schemes and altering the text size to display more notes.

Finally, click the Database tab at the top of the Quotepad Settings dialogue box. From here it’s possible to create a new database to store notes for a particular project (separating large projects into different databases will help with speed) or switch from the current one to another one that has already been created. Backups can be made from here, too. Check out the Quotepad window next to it and you’ll see it has got the colour scheme and smaller text size we specified in the previous step.