After over 30 years as a staple Windows application, Microsoft has announced that WordPad will be removed from future builds of Windows 11. The text editing program, which first debuted in Windows 95, will not be automatically installed on Windows 11 and eventually phased out completely.
This news came as part of the recent Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26020 for the Canary Channel. Microsoft stated that WordPad will not be available for reinstallation after it is removed. So this is very likely the end of the road for the classic app.
WordPad has long been positioned by Microsoft as a middle ground between full-featured Word and barebones Notepad. It offered basic formatting options like fonts, colors and paragraph alignment that made it popular for small documents and notes. But over the years, it seems WordPad became squeezed as Microsoft promoted Word for more robust documents and Notepad for plain text.
The company hinted at this in its documentation, recommending Word for rich text formats and Notepad for plain text. With capable alternatives available, Microsoft likely saw little value in continuing to develop WordPad. The writing may have already been on the wall, as Microsoft never updated WordPad with a dark mode for Windows 11. Meanwhile, Notepad received a dark mode and is slated to get new autosave capabilities.
So while it’s the end of the line for WordPad, its predecessor Notepad seems poised to continue as a Windows fixture. For many, WordPad was their first experience with word processing before graduating to Word. But with its demise, Microsoft is clearly streamlining its apps for the way people create documents today. For quick notes, there’s Notepad. And for anything more advanced, the ubiquitous Office suite has it covered. After 30 years of changes in technology, WordPad simply became the odd app out.
