Microsoft is Ditching Yet Another Classic Windows Feature

Microsoft confirmed that after twenty-eight years of service, it will be ceasing support for the WordPad feature for the Windows client. Microsoft has been recently deprecating a lot of features from past versions of the client for Windows 11. Not too long ago, the latest update of Windows 11 dropped Cortana support, a virtual assistant app that was introduced in 2014 as a rival to Apple's Siri. WordPad is another one of these features that will no longer be supported in future versions of Windows.

WordPad was first introduced with 1995 with the release of Windows 95, replacing the Windows Write software. WordPad has been included in all versions of the client since, being a more advanced version of Notepad, but also a simpler version of the Microsoft Word writing tool. It was a simple but effective text editor that could fulfill all kinds of functions for writers and could save rich text documents and plain text documents. This tool will no longer be a supported feature of Windows effective immediately.

In a new blog post posted to Microsoft's website, it listed a number of deprecated features and functions in the latest version of Windows. The deprecation stage is when a part of Windows is no longer in active development. Among things like the Snipping Tool and Cortana, WordPad was announced to be in this state and will be removed in a future release.

The blog post mentions that with WordPad's eventual removal from Windows, users can use other software for text editing purposes. It mentions that rich text documents like doc or rtf files can be edited best using Microsoft Word, while plain text documents like txt files can be edited easily using Notepad. Both are still staples of the Windows client, with Notepad having been an active feature of Windows since its very first version, while Microsoft Word can be used if a user has a standalone purchase of the service or a subscription to Microsoft 365.

Windows' WordPad is considered a bit of a middle ground between Microsoft Word and Notepad, having no advanced features like spellcheck or a thesaurus while writing. The release of Google's services like Google Docs or other online document writing software as a competitor to Microsoft's software suite has likely seen the usage of WordPad going down. While both WordPad and Google Docs are free-to-use, the latter has been one of the go-to writing tools, with many preferring it since the documents are saved over Google Drive while also providing a lot of the same features that Microsoft Word does.