A tiny Windows classic has suddenly grown up… and it might save you a surprising amount of time each week.
Notepad.
Yes, the same Notepad many of us probably haven’t touched since the early 2000s
Microsoft has been quietly transforming it, and the latest upgrade is a big one: you can now create tables directly inside Notepad—very much like Word.
And before you assume it’s fiddly… it’s really not. In some cases, it’s actually simpler than Word.
Open Notepad, glance up at the new formatting toolbar, and hit the Table button.
A small pop‑up appears where you choose your rows and columns—say, 3 by 4.
Click Insert and… boom. A clean, perfectly aligned table
Which means you can now whip up things like:
– Tidy to‑do lists
– Quick comparison tables
– Simple trackers
– Client notes
All without firing up Word, waiting for it to load, or dealing with documents that mysteriously leap to page 9
Notepad also gained rich text formatting last year—bold, italics, underline, bullet points, the works.
Microsoft calls all this “lightweight” formatting, which basically means it won’t bog your computer down
Love that.
If you prefer the old-school, bare‑bones Notepad, you can switch these features off in Settings.
You can even disable things like auto‑recovery or the Copilot integration (which only applies if you’re using Microsoft 365 Copilot anyway).
But honestly, this feels like one of those small-but-mighty updates—the kind that helps you stay organised without feeling like you’re battling your software.
