Microsoft has announced that it will remove WordPad in an upcoming Windows update because it is no longer under active development, but the company has not specified an exact date for this change.
Microsoft has quietly revealed that WordPad, the basic word processor included with Windows since 1995, will be phased out. 28 years ago, Microsoft announced WordPad, the successor to another text editor called Microsoft Write. Since then, WordPad has been incorporated into every version of Windows, providing users with basic text editing functionality with support for RTF, DOC, ODT, and other popular formats.
However, nearly three decades later, it looks like Microsoft is finally ready to say goodbye to its old software. Indeed, according to an updated article on the Microsoft website, WordPad is among the features and functionality that are no longer developed in Windows and which will be removed in a future update.
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An update will permanently remove Wordpad from Windows
While the app had been automatically installed on Windows systems since 1995, it had been considered, along with Paint, an optional feature since 2019. This meant that users could remove it if they wished. In the end, it seems that this was a harbinger.
Microsoft will therefore remove its word processing software in a future update, but did not specify which one. We will of course keep you informed as soon as we have more details on this subject.
Without surprise, Microsoft now suggests users switch to Microsoft Word to create and edit rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf files and Use Windows Notepad to work with plain text documents such as .txt files.
WordPad’s retirement isn’t unexpected after all, as the application hasn’t seen major improvements in a long time. On the other hand, Microsoft has invested in improving the Notepad app for Windowsadding new features such as support for tabs, support for dark mode, improved Find and Replace, and the ability to open multiple files at once.