Format USB drive to NTFS so it is usable under Windows

gparted (GNU Partition Editor) is a good graphical tool for formating drives to a variety of different filesystem types. You can install it with sudo apt-get install gparted.

Just as when you are using Disks, be very careful that you are making changes to the correct device. You can format your device to NTFS using the following steps:

1. Select the correct device from the dropdown selector on the top right.
2. Delete any partitions that already exist on the device.
3. Create a new partition using all of the available space and set the type to ntfs
4. Click the "Apply" button and wait for the operations to complete

If Windows still doesn't recognize the device, the partition table may be in a different type than the MS-DOS type (Ubuntu uses gpt partition type by default I think). Click "View >> Device Information" from the menu to see what the partition table type is. In this case, use the "Device >> Create Partition Table" menu option to change the partition table type to MS-DOS. You may have to follow the above steps again to create your NTFS partition.

With mkntfs

Install mkntfs which is provided by package ntfs-3g:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

Find the partition of your USB drive with lsblk -f or df -h. Let's assume it's at /dev/sdb1.

Unmount the drive with umount /dev/sdb, otherwise you'll get the error

/dev/sdb1 is mounted.
Refusing to make a filesystem here!

Then format the partition:

sudo mkntfs --fast --label myUsbDrive /dev/sdb1

If that succeeded, you'll see a message like this:

Cluster size has been automatically set to 4096 bytes.
Creating NTFS volume structures.
mkntfs completed successfully. Have a nice day.