Microsoft has quietly revealed that WordPad, the essential phrase processor that’s been included with Home windows since 1995, is being retired.
“WordPad is now not being up to date and will likely be eliminated in a future launch of Home windows,” the Deprecated options for Home windows shopper web page on Microsoft Study notes in a September 1, 2023 addition. “We suggest Microsoft Phrase for wealthy textual content paperwork like .doc and .rtf and Home windows Notepad for plain textual content paperwork like .txt.”
Home windows Intelligence In Your Inbox
Join our new free publication to get three time-saving ideas every Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott’s Home windows 11 and Home windows 10 Subject Guides (usually $9.99) as a particular welcome reward!
“*” signifies required fields
There’s no motive to be outraged by this determination, as WordPad has been out-of-date for years and is barely usable for its supposed goal, which was to exchange to view and edit wealthy textual content recordsdata (RTF, or *.rtf). WordPad was launched in Home windows 95 as a substitute for Write, which was bundled with all earlier Home windows variations courting again to the unique in 1985, and it had two main updates over time: the flexibility to open Microsoft Phrase paperwork in Home windows XP (2001) and a ribbon person interface in Home windows 7 (2009).
There have been different updates, after all, however WordPad seems anachronistic in trendy Home windows variations, like some vestigial reminder of the previous. And whereas Microsoft’s recommendation to make use of Microsoft Phrase as a substitute appears a bit off-base, provided that Phrase is a paid product, RTF is never used lately, and anybody can entry the online variations of Phrase at no cost if wanted.
Anyway, it’s attention-grabbing that Microsoft revealed this deprecation individually from any main Home windows model, although that’s not totally distinctive for minor options. And the timing of its elimination is unclear. For instance, Cortana was deprecated again in 2021 alongside Skype, but it surely was solely made non-functional a couple of month in the past and nonetheless hasn’t been faraway from Home windows. (Microsoft additionally lately introduced that it was deprecating some obscure Edge options lately.)