
RELATED: What Are Character Encodings Like ANSI and Unicode, and How Do They Differ? You Stay in Control Other programs write their specially formatted notes in proprietary file formats or even databases that may not be easily readable in the future. Text files are as old as personal computers themselves (older, in fact), and as long as Windows writes its text files to an industry-standard format like ASCII or Unicode, it’s very likely that you’ll be able to read your notes on any computer platform far into the future. By the way, if you want a quick way to timestamp your notes with Notepad, just hit F5, and the current date and time will be instantly inserted into your file.
