Microsoft is no longer updating WordPad and plans to remove the word processor from a future version of Windows. The software giant would instead recommend Microsoft Word, a paid word processor that’s always been more feature-rich than the basic WordPad app that’s shipped as part of Windows since Windows 95.
“WordPad is no longer updated and will be removed in a future version of Windows,” the text message read Support note Posted by Microsoft on Friday. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents such as .txt.”
News of WordPad’s removal comes just a day after Microsoft revealed it was upgrading Notepad with features like auto-save and auto-restore tabs. Microsoft updated its Windows Notepad app in 2018 for the first time in years and continued to add tabs to the Windows 11 version.
However, WordPad has not received as much attention. The word processor has been updated with Windows 7’s Ribbon UI, but after a minor redesign for Windows 8, it doesn’t have any major additions. Microsoft will now completely remove WordPad in a “future version of Windows,” which will likely be the version of Windows 12 we expect to see in 2024 with a lot of AI-powered features.
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