WordPad End of Life

After nearly 30 years of including it with Windows, Microsoft is now planning to remove WordPad from Windows.

As of now, WordPad will stop receiving updates and a future update will remove it from Windows altogether. Microsoft haven’t stated how soon this will happen, but knowing it is on the horizon will enable users to find and familiarise themselves with alternatives. A similar situation occurred with Internet Explorer, which stopped receiving updates, prompted users to switch to Edge, and has now become completely unavailable on Windows.

While WordPad has been part of Windows for a long time, it has become increasingly redundant due to free alternatives to Word being widely available. Being halfway between a plain text editor and a full word processor has meant that WordPad was as either too simple or filled with unnecessary features compared to other applications.

Word Online is available for free to home users, and alternatives that are also free include Google Docs and LibreOffice. These can all be used to create and edit Rich text Format (*.rtf) files as well, although these are seldom used anymore.

Notepad, the other text program packaged with Windows, remains popular for being simple and fast, which makes it useful for taking notes or editing configuration files that are read by computer programs.

If you have and questions about any of the software that comes with Windows, just get in touch.