Microsoft Retires WordPad, Improves Notepad
After nearly 30 years, Microsoft has decided to retire the WordPad app, a basic word-processing tool that has been around since Windows 95. The company won’t be updating WordPad any further and plans to remove it in a future Windows release, which could be either a new version like Windows 12 or a major update to Windows 11.
One of the reasons for this move is that WordPad wasn’t as simple as Notepad, nor did it offer the advanced features of Microsoft Word. In fact, Microsoft recommends using Microsoft Word for rich text documents and Windows Notepad for plain text files. With this said, it appears that there is no need for Wordpad.
WordPad’s primary advantage was being free, but with the availability of other free and user-friendly word processors, it became less used. Online tools like Google Docs have also become popular, making WordPad less relevant and needed.
WordPad has seen minimal changes since Windows 7 or 8, which contributed to its usage decline. In response, Microsoft is improving Notepad, another basic text editor. Recent updates to Notepad include the ability to open multiple tabs, and future updates will introduce an autosave feature. Whether these changes can attract more users to Notepad remains to be seen.
