QuotePad

QuotePad is a tiny and practical software utility that facilitates a quick method to copy text from any application (along with its source) into a word processor without having to paste it, thanks to a keyboard shortcut. This is a great assistant for gathering notes and sources for research papers.

The tool can be installed as a normal program or made portable, by storing all its files in a single folder on the disk. This option also means that you can save QuotePad to a removable storage device to directly run it on any PC with minimum effort. It doesn't modify Windows registry settings.

Once launched, the app creates an icon the taskbar notifications area and remains minimized there until bringing up its panel. From this point on, you can select text in any open program and hit the Ctrl+Shift+Q key combination to immediately send it in QuotePad's editor with its source.

The app's biggest advantage is that you can copy as many notes as you want sequentially, since the previous one in the panel is not overwritten. You can bring up the main window to view the recorded time, edit content, change the notes' order in the list, as well as remove or print them.

QuotePad provides you with an alarm system too. You can activate reminders for any notes and specify the start date and time, frequency (once, once in.., daily, every..). What's more, you can leave yourself a comment, enter a subject, schedule an application to launch, or set a sound to play. Settings can be saved as default.

It's possible to use a search function when dealing with a large amount of notes, filter them, export all of them to a plain text document, ask QuotePad to automatically run at every Windows startup until further notice, hide the systray icon, or view all previously disabled messages.

You can switch to a different color scheme, change the font size, group notes by day, month or year, hide subjects and line breaks, adjust the transparency level, or make QuotePad's frame stay on top of other windows. Plus, you can remap hotkeys for quoting the selected text, adding new reminders, and hiding the QuotePad window.

The tool offers support for multiple UI languages. It worked well in our tests, without hanging, crashing or prompting errors. On the other hand, we've noticed it has some compatibility issues with certain third-party apps. When copying text from Google Chrome in our evaluation, for example, it managed to quote the content to the text editor but didn't specify the URL.

QuotePad proves to be a pretty reliable asset for easily taking notes with their sources and scheduling reminders. Plus, it's free to use.