Microsoft has quietly announced that it will be killing off WordPad, the first-party word processing app that has been included together with numerous iterations of its operating system since Windows 95. The company revealed this via a support document published on its website last week on 1 September 2023, which was first spotted by tech website Neowin.
“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” Microsoft wrote in the document. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”
For the longest time (over 28 years, to be exact), WordPad serves as an entry-level word processing software and is included for free with every copy of the operating system. However, unlike its big brother Microsoft Word, the app only offers basic formatting tools and supports a handful of document types.
As you’d expect, its limitations resulted in the app becoming easily overshadowed by free alternative word processors such as OpenOffice and Google Docs, as well as Windows’ other built-in application NotePad. The latter, despite having less formatting tools than WordPad, is the more preferred choice by users for jotting down quick notes and so on. In fact, NotePad has been getting more useful updates such as allowing users to open up multiple tabs, while an upcoming version will finally allow it to autosave your work.
Microsoft WordPad is expected to be completely removed from “a future release of Windows”. It is unclear whether the company is referring to an upcoming patch for Windows 11 or its next generation successor (tentatively called Windows 12) that’s rumoured to be revealed next year.
(Source: Neowin)
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