Windows 10: My notepad text showing weird symbols and characters

Hi,
Please can you help me, I suffered from a virus attack and my computer is no longer behaving properly! Microsoft Office won't open and I had some backups made by Macrium Reflect which look like they are corrupt and the icon of the backup has changed to notepad and when I want to restore, Macrium no longer recongnised them.The main thing is my important notepad text files, which were kept on a separate drive, have changed to some weird charaters as well! Is there anyway I can convert them back to my original text?

Thank you!




:)

 

Notepad showing symbols?

I tried to open a notepad with lyrics in a different language, and the English on the file is fine, but the text in the other language shows up as a bunch of symbols. How can I fix this?

 

To Find Text in Notepad

How to Find and Replace Text in Notepad in Windows 10


Notepad is a simple text editor included in Windows and a basic text-editing program which enables computer users to create documents.

You can search to find text in Notepad, and search to find and replace text in Notepad.

Starting with Windows 10 build 17713, Microsoft made significant improvements to the find/replace experience in Notepad. Microsoft added the option to do wrap-around find/replace to the find dialog and Notepad will now remember previously entered values and the state of checkboxes and automatically populate them the next time you open the find dialog. Additionally, when you have text selected and open the find dialog it will automatically populate the search field with the selected text.

This tutorial will show you how to find and replace text within a document in Notepad in Windows 10.


CONTENTS:

• Option One: To Find Text in Notepad
• Option Two: To Replace Text in Notepad

OPTION ONE

To Find Text in Notepad
1. While in Notepad, perform one of the following actions you want to search and find text: (see screenshots below)

• Press the Ctrl+F keys.
• Select (highlight) text you want to search and find, and press the Ctrl+F keys.
• Click/tap on Edit on the menu bar, and click/tap on Find.

2. Type what you want to find in the Find what field if it doesn't already have what you want.

3. Check or uncheck the Match case box for what you want.

4. Check or uncheck the Wrap around box for what you want.

*note Wrap around is only available starting with Windows 10 build 17713.

5. Select (dot) Up or Down for the Direction where the cursor is at within the text you want to find from.

6. When you are ready to starting finding the text entered in step 2, perform one of the following actions you want:

• Click/tap on the Find Next button.
• Press the F3 key. If the Find dialog is currently open, then you will need to click/tap on the Find Next button at least once first.
• Click/tap on Edit on the menu bar, and click/tap on Find Next. This option will not work if the Find dialog is currently open.

7. Repeat step 6 to find all instances of the text entered in step 2, and/or click/tap on OK when it cannot find any other instances.













OPTION TWO

To Replace Text in Notepad
1. While in Notepad, perform one of the following actions you want to search and find text to replace: (see screenshots below)

• Press the Ctrl+H keys.
• Select (highlight) text you want to search and find, and press the Ctrl+H keys.
• Click/tap on Edit on the menu bar, and click/tap on Replace.

2. Type what you want to find in the Find what field if it doesn't already have what you want.

3. Type what you want to replace text with from step 2 in the Replace with field.

4. Check or uncheck the Match case box for what you want.

5. Check or uncheck the Wrap around box for what you want.

*note Wrap around is only available starting with Windows 10 build 17713.

6. When you are ready to start to find text entered in step 2, perform one of the following actions you want:

• Click/tap on the Find Next button.
• Press the F3 key. If the Replace dialog is currently open, then you will need to click/tap on the Find Next button at least once first.

7. If you want to replace this specific text found with text entered in step 3, click/tap on the Replace button.

*note You can click/tap on the Replace All button instead if you want to go ahead and automatically replace all found text from step 2 with text entered in step 3.

8. Repeat step 6 and step 7 to find and replace all instances of text you want, and/or click/tap on OK when it cannot find any other instances.







That's it,
Shawn


Related Tutorials

• How to Enable or Disable Extended Line Endings in Notepad in Windows 10
• How to Reset Default Open Position and Size of Notepad in Windows 10
• How to Search with Bing from Notepad in Windows 10
• How to Change Zoom Level of Text in Notepad in Windows 10

 

Windows 10 Character Map and Notepad

When making a list in Notepad I want to place a check mark beside some of the listed items.
So tonight I googled a way to do that. I came across a webpage on control keys and symbols.
The instructions stated that Open the Character Map and under the pull down menu item look for Windlings 2.
I did that and found my check mark symbol. PTL. So I selected the check mark symbol and copied it.
So I went to my opened notepad document and did the right click menu with the mouse and selected paste.
Instead of the check mark symbol I got the Capital Letter P. I just tried to paste the check mark symbol here and I got (P) again.

So do I need to be in unicode mode to get the check mark to work? Hey I know it is less complicated if I use shift x butt I wanted to "spread my winglings"!