Ken Evans:the file opened in notepad by default! (quite a mess)
The file is plain text, with Unix style line endings (just newline, not carriage-return/line feed). I can update it, or you can use Wordpad. Right-click "Open with...", select wordpad, and say "always open...". Or choose any other plain-text or programmers editor that isn't as broken as Notepad 
.
Ken Evans: How would I use the file? (i.e. in what part of the development process?)
The ActiveFacts toolkit is available for installation, using the instructions on my website. It includes the ActiveFacts generator program afgen, which can be used to convert either a CQL or an ORM file into SQL (MySQL or MSSQL), CQL, Ruby code, and any other language for which a small output adapter can be written (the SQL adapters are 200 lines of code each, the Ruby one is 140; these are not difficult things to write). In other words, you can use it exactly as you would use NORMA, but without needing Visual Studio.
I use CQL for modeling, and with clients even during initial interviews, for preference over NORMA and ORM2. The clients can read it directly and readily understand and participate in the modeling exercise. Later, when the generated code is being used to develop an application, any team member (or the client) can formulate changes, and these changes are easy to communicate by email without any special tools being needed to create or view them, and integrated into the current version easily. Consider the difficulty of accurately merging more than one set of changes to a base NORMA model - almost imposisble to be sure you've done it correctly! In the same way, source code control and revision management systems can automatically merge and detect conflicts, which is still impossible with NORMA.
In short, I find CQL preferable in many ways to the ORM2 graphical notation.