In the age of rich web applications, mobile browsers, HTML5 and unmanned aerial vehicles, who would have thought that Windows Notepad could still be useful?
Personally, I find myself in notepad multiple times in a given development day. Not just for quick notes while I'm on the phone, but also to strip all non-text items from any copied to the clipboard.
To further my point, consider that you have a content management system, and find that copying text from Microsoft word, into your WYSIWYG editor leaves some messy markup. Using Notepad, you can easily paste that information, stripping all markup. Then, paste from Notepad into your WYSIWYG.
Today, I discovered that this technique is also useful to copy tables from the web. What happens when an HTML table contains markup, or graphics, and you need to copy it into an Excel spreadsheet.
If you've ever tried to do this, and actually waited around to see it complete, you know how disappointing it is.
But, if you were to first copy this table into notepad, then save it as a CSV (yes, I know it's technically tab-delimitted), you would find that Excel has a much easier time parsing the data.