Goodbye WordPad
Microsoft is retiring its basic word processor WordPad after 28 years, Thurrott reports.
The publication spotted the announcement in the notes of the Deprecated features for Windows clients page on Microsoft Learn posted on 1 September 2023.
“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” the page stated.
“We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”
WordPad has been available as a type of mid-way between Notepad and Microsoft Word since it was first released in 1995.
While it offers greater text editing capabilities than Notepad, it does not have as many features as the latter. However, unlike Word, it is completely free.
The decision to end WordPad is unlikely to trouble many users as the app has not received updates in many years.
WordPad’s .rtf file format is also widely supported by other word processing software.
For the most basic text editing, Microsoft is still regularly updating Notepad.
While Microsoft Word is a paid product in its offline form, its web version is available online for free, as is Google’s alternative — Google Docs.
Another free alternative is the open-source productivity suite LibreOffice, which was forked from OpenOffice.org.
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