Microsoft retiring WordPad
It has been revealed by reports that after 28 years, Microsoft is retiring its basic word processor WordPad. The announcement was spotted by Thurrott in the notes of the Deprecated features for Windows clients page on Microsoft Learn posted on the 1st of September 2023. The page stated: “WordPad is no longer being updated and
Microsoft-retiring-WordPad
It has been revealed by reports that after 28 years, Microsoft is retiring its basic word processor WordPad.
The announcement was spotted by Thurrott in the notes of the Deprecated features for Windows clients page on Microsoft Learn posted on the 1st of September 2023. The page stated: “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,”
It also added: “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”
This word processor has been available as a type of mid-way between Notepad and Microsoft Word since it was first released in 1995. As much as it offers greater text editing capabilities than Notepad, it is missing some of the feature that the latter has. However, unlike Word, it is completely free.
This decisions is probably not going to cause trouble to 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. Microsoft is still regularly updating Notepad for the the most basic text editing.
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.
