Fresh off the heels of discontinuing Cortana, Microsoft is setting its sights on another target, aiming at WordPad. This seemingly innocent text editor, positioned between Notepad’s simplicity and Word’s full-fledged capabilities, has found itself on the chopping block.
In a notice titled “Deprecated features for Windows client,” Microsoft has declared that WordPad, the text editor that has dutifully served Windows users since its debut in Windows 95, will no longer receive updates and will eventually be removed from future Windows releases. “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.” Microsoft stated.
In today’s digital landscape, it’s plausible that many users have shifted their allegiance to alternatives like Google Docs, making WordPad’s retirement more of a formality than a significant loss. Microsoft Word, however, appears to be safe from the chopping block, primarily due to the inertia that often prevails in office environments. The prospect of changing the word processor that employees have grown accustomed to could send management into a panic.
Despite its longevity, WordPad has always been somewhat limited in its capabilities. Lacking features such as spellcheck, thesaurus support, or the ability to handle footnotes and page breaks, it occupied a niche space in the Windows ecosystem. Its main utility lay in opening .rtf files when the need arose. While some users may not mourn its departure, removing WordPad will free up approximately 6.25 MB of disk space, a modest but notable benefit.
The demise of WordPad marks the end of an era for this middle-ground text editor. As Microsoft shifts its focus and resources toward other software offerings, it’s a reminder of the ever-evolving nature of technology and the need to adapt to changing user preferences.
While WordPad may have outlived its usefulness for many, it remains a nostalgic symbol of the early days of personal computing.