In a significant move, Microsoft has decided to retire WordPad, its long-standing text editor that has been a part of Windows since Windows 95. Reports indicate that the company will no longer update the software and plans to remove it from a future version of the Windows operating system.
A support note published by Microsoft states, "WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.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.”
While the support note confirms the removal, it does not provide a specific reason for this decision. This move comes shortly after Microsoft updated Microsoft Notepad, another built-in Windows text editor, with features like autosave and automatic restoration of tabs.
WordPad has been a part of the Windows ecosystem for several decades, introduced alongside Windows 95, and has remained a basic word processing tool for Windows users. Its retirement suggests that Microsoft may be focusing more on its other text editing and word processing solutions, such as Microsoft Word and Notepad, for different types of document editing needs.
