I use notepad to edit them but when I save them they never get saved as such but instead become notepad files. I thought about buying a CR2 editor but I've already burned up my monthly budget for this new hobby of mine. Is there some trick to editing CR2 files in notepad or wordpad and not having them revert to note or wordpad files?

Maxx, real briefly how would you create a mat file? Thats an area that I haven't studied yet, are there any tutorials out there?