It has been 28 years since Microsoft officially announced WordPad, the successor to a classic text editor called Microsoft Write.
WordPad appeared as part of Windows 95, Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system at the time. Since then, WordPad has been available in every release of Windows, providing users with basic text editing capabilities, supporting RTF, DOC, ODT, and many other popular formats. After nearly three decades, WordPad has become obsolete and is no longer as widely used as before, leading to Microsoft’s decision to die.
Microsoft recently made an official announcement about discontinuing maintenance of the WordPad application. The company says WordPad is no longer in development, meaning there won’t be any feature updates or security patches released for the app. In addition, in the near future, Microsoft will also completely remove WordPad from the Windows environment.
WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in future Windows releases. We recommend using Microsoft Word for text documents with formats such as .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents such as .txt.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of WordPad alternatives from Microsoft itself and third parties for you to use. You can use Notepad for basic text editing, or switch to more advanced editors, such as Microsoft Word.
WordPad isn’t the only component Microsoft is removing from Windows. The company also recently discontinued its virtual assistant Cortana, and the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT). In addition, Microsoft will also soon disable old Transport Layer Security protocols to make Windows 11 more secure.