San Francisco: WordPad will soon become history as Microsoft has decided to discontinue the text editing app in Microsoft Windows Accessories from new releases of the popular operating system.
WordPad is part of Accessories along with Notepad since the launch of Windows 95. Though not as powerful as Microsoft Word, WordPad saves rich text documents unlike Notepad which is used to generate simple text files.
After being part of Windows Accessories for nearly thirty years, WordPad will be discarded soon for Microsoft Word though the tech giant has not specified any time limit.
“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” reads a support note published by Microsoft on Friday. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt”, it added.
“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” reads a support note published by Microsoft on Friday.
“We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt”, it added.
Microsoft Word is part of the tech giant’s Office Suit that also comes bundled with Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and other office tools. They all are paid versions unlike WordPad and Notepad that come free with Windows operating system.
The tech giant has also not explained why the app is being removed from Windows OS though speculations are rife that limited popularity of the app could be one of the reasons behind the decision.
There is no real statistics to show how many people are using WordPad. But industry insiders say the app has a very limited number of users also because there are many other free and open source word processors like LibreOffice, Zoho Docs, WPS office available for users.
Then there’s Google Docs that lets users edit any word file format online without even downloading any separate app on the device meaning there’s no shortage of word processing apps and services today.
Interestingly, the reports that WordPad will be removal from future released of Windows OS come just a day after Microsoft revealed it is upgrading Notepad with features like auto-save and automatic restore tabs.
Microsoft updated its Windows Notepad app in 2018 for the first time in years and went on to add tabs to the Windows 11 version.
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