End of WordPad, as Microsoft Officially Announces its Removal in Future Updates

It’s time to bid adieu to WordPad, one of the popular text-based apps, from Microsoft, as the company plans to remove it from future Windows updates. After being a part of Windows for almost three decades, WordPad will now be removed from upcoming Windows updates as the company officially announced the same on 1st September 2023 through a support note on its official site.

“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt“- an official support note from Microsoft.

As per the company’s statement, it will shut down the WordPad app and will recommend its paid word processor, Microsoft Word as an alternative. Microsoft Word, a part of the Microsoft Office 365 subscription, has an array of advanced features that the WordPad lacked.

First introduced in the year 1995 with Windows 95, WordPad has hardly been updated over the course of 30 years. It received its last update with the Windows 7’s Ribbon UI update and hasn’t been altered ever since. The app has been integrated and comes pre-installed in all Windows operating systems since 1995.

But since February 2020, with the Windows 10 Insider Build 19551, the company declared WordPad as an optional app that the users can uninstall through the Optional Feature control panel if they want to.

The deprecation news of WordPad came a day after Microsoft announced future updates for its other free text-based app Notepad. Notepad will now auto-save and auto-restore the tabs as per the updates. Even Notepad first received its updates in 2018 when the company added a handful of features and tabs in the Windows 11 update. Although, Notepad remains less superior to WordPad as it still doesn’t support rich text document formats and only supports .txt format.

As the leading tech giant Microsoft announced the news of entirely terminating WordPad from Windows, it points towards the end of an era! WordPad has been a part of Windows for almost 30 years now, thus it holds a notable value for the users. It has aided people in their basic text-editing and word-processing needs for years.

Apart from the deprecation of WordPad, Microsoft has also recently announced the deprecation of its voice-based assistant Cortona for Windows 11. Microsoft’s Cortona has already been deprecated as a standalone app for Android and iOS. Now, the company is heading towards ending its support for the Microsoft Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams Rooms.

The deprecation of Cortona is assumed to be done keeping in mind the integration of ChatGPT-powered Bing Chat in the system. The company is currently working on the Windows 12 OS update, which is expected to be released in the year 2024 with a bunch of new features and tools, especially those powered by AI just like Microsoft Copilot.