Microsoft Discontinues WordPad for Windows
Microsoft is killing one of its most popular products for Windows users. The company has announced that it will stop providing updates for WordPad. In fact, the brand also plans to remove the word app from future releases of Windows after 30 years of experience.
As an alternative, Microsoft recommends Word, its paid word application, which has always been much more powerful than WordPad, which has been included with Windows since 1995.
“WordPad will no longer be updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents such as .txt,” says a support note released by Microsoft on Friday.
WordPad’s removal comes just a day after Microsoft announced it was updating Notepad with features like auto-save and tab retraction. Windows 11’s Windows Notepad app was updated for the first time in years in 2018, adding tabs.
After iOS and Android last month, Microsoft has now announced that it will shut down its digital assistant Cortana app in Windows 11. Although Cortana in Windows is a standalone application, Cortana support in Teams Mobile, Microsoft Teams desktop, and Microsoft Teams has been deprecated. The rooms will end in autumn 2023.
In June, Microsoft removed some old settings from File Explorer’s Folder Options section as part of an effort to reduce the number of File Explorer settings in Windows 11.
