Microsoft Announces the End of WordPad

Microsoft has announced the end of WordPad, its text editor stuck between the full-featured Word and bare-bones Notepad.

As reported by PC Gamer, Microsoft shared in a “deprecated features for Windows” blog post that WordPad will no longer be included in future versions of the operating system.

“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.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,” it said.

The software replaced Microsoft Write in Windows 95 but today seemingly struggles to find a place between Microsoft’s Word and Notepad. WordPad lacks things like spellcheck and footnotes but also isn’t as quick and simple as Notepad.

It’s not the only Microsoft casualty of late as the company also scrapped its virtual assistant Cortana from Windows 11. Its death was long and slow, first being removed from Xbox and then Android and iOS before being scrapped from Windows 11.