Use Notepad to open any text file in Windows 7 right click

Notepad is a lightweight and handy text editor that comes with Windows operating system.

There is a trick in Windows that can let you right click on any text document and instantly open it with Notepad for reading or editing.

What you need to do is just to include a shortcut of Notepad into your "Send to" menu.

Below is the steps to do it for Windows 7:

Step 1: Open Windows > Run... or alternatively press the Windows + R keys on your keyboard.

Step 2: Key in "shell:sendto" and press the OK button. This will open Explorer and bring you right into your SendTo folder. The content in this folder are the items that will appear in your "Send to" menu whenever you right click on any file or folder. (If you are using Windows XP, then key in "sendto" only and press the OK button.)

Step 3: In this SendTo folder, create a new shortcut to "%windir%\system32\notepad.exe". That's all you need to do.

Now, right click on any text file, go inside the "Send to" menu and open the file with Notepad. Pretty handy isn't it?

You can use this trick to easily open files such as README, *.log, *.ini, *.nfo, ...

Note that you can actually use Notepad to open any file, but if the file is not in text format, you probably just able to see chunk of codes only.

Also note that this trick is applicable for the user currently using the Windows 7 only. If you have multiple users in the system, then the other users need to repeat the same steps above for their own Windows account.