Finally WordPad from Windows – Windows 11

In the official announcement, the software giant instead recommends Microsoft Word, the paid word processor for Microsoft 365 (formerly Office). Word has always been more feature-rich than WordPad, and it first appeared on Windows with the release of Windows 95.

“WordPad is no longer updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” reads a support note published by Microsoft on Friday. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt,” the company specifically states.

News of WordPad’s removal comes just a day after it was revealed that Microsoft will upgrade Notepad with features like autosave and autorestore tabs. The company first updated Notepad in 2018 after many years with the addition of tabs to the Windows 11 version.

However, WordPad never received the same love from Microsoft. The text editor was updated with the Ribbon UI for Windows 7, but after a minor redesign for Windows 8, it lacked key 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 many AI-based features.