Microsoft WordPad is going away from Windows after about 30 years

WordPad is finally going away. Microsoft has announced that it will no longer update WordPad and plans to remove the word processor from a future release of Windows 11. As an alternative, Microsoft will recommend Word, its paid word processor that has always been far more powerful than WordPad, which has shipped with Windows since 1995.

“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.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,” reads a support note published by Microsoft on Friday.

The WordPad removal comes just a day after Microsoft announced it was upgrading Notepad with features like autosave and tab retraction. The Windows Notepad app in Windows 11 was updated for the first time in years in 2018 and tabs were added. But instead of giving a similar treatment to WordPad, Microsoft is discontinuing it for good. I am not sure how this decision will affect Windows 11 users. But for what it is worth, it will have a minimal impact because I have rarely seen any PC user accessing WordPad. It is either the Notepad or Microsoft Word depending on the needs.

Cortana’s going away, too

Last month, after iOS and Android, Microsoft announced to shut down its digital assistant Cortana app on Windows 11. While Cortana in Windows as a standalone app is deprecated, the support for Cortana in Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams Rooms will end in the fall of 2023. Cortana’s likely replacement is Copilot, which is currently a part of the Windows Insider programme. In August, Microsoft started rolling out the Windows Copilot update on PCs running Windows 11 version 22631.2129. That was an extension to the kickoff that allowed only a handful of testers to access Windows Copilot. Now, there are more testers giving feedback on the functionality that brings AI to almost every aspect of Windows OS.

In June, Microsoft removed some of the old settings under Folder Options in File Explorer as part of an effort to reduce the number of File Explorer settings on Windows 11.

— Written with inputs from IANS