We have spoken a lot about the best ways to take notes on a laptop during classes, lectures or meetings. I always found specific applications either too feature rich (bulky) or not enough features. I wanted something super simple to use but it also needed to record the time I was writing the notes.

A little, free note-taking software app called QuotePad seemed to do the trick for me. They have filtering options, backups, reminders and checklists. I downloaded the portable application from here.

That’s right, I said portable!

When you install the application it asks you if you want to install it normally or on a USB drive as a portable application. I chose to use it as a portable application and pointed it to a USB portable hard drive I have.

You can see the installation options below:

After installation you get to choose your preferred language. They have an impressive list of languages installed as you can see below:

I chose English, clicked the check box to not show it again, and clicked OK. You will see a new system tray icon and a bubble Windows tip over it showing you how to use QuotePad. We need to left click on the icon to show the main window:

I left clicked on the icon and it brought up the main QuotePad window as you can see below:

I double clicked on the note and entered some basic information such as the name of my meeting, some basic notes, a phone number and a to-do item. You can see this below:

You need to click on the blue check mark (ok) to save your item. After you click ok you will be brought back to the main screen, where you can see your notes and add reminders.

By clicking on the alarm bell next to your note you can add a reminder to it. So my action item in the note, to schedule my database administrator to perform some client work, can set off a reminder on my computer to help me remember.

The application does not come with audio files so you can either use your Windows system sounds by pointing it to your C:\WINDOWS\Media folder or use any MP3 file you have lying around.

Now after entering some notes let’s see how to filter our notes. Without any notes selected start typing the words you want to find. QuotePad will eliminate any notes that do not meet your criteria.

You can see I typed in Round Room and it filtered out everything except what I was looking for.

When I delete my filter by hitting backspace until the filter is black, all my messages will return.

We can also right click on our system tray icon and choose find to search through our notes. This is very helpful after you have been using the application for a while. Reminders can also be entered directly from the system tray by choosing new reminder. This will skip creating a note and just add a reminder.

Do you have a favourite small, portable note taking software? If so we would love to hear about it in the comments!