Microsoft To Discontinue Support For Wordpad After Nearly Three Decades: 'No Longer Being Updated And Will Be Removed'

After almost 30 years, Microsoft Corp. MSFT has announced the discontinuation of WordPad, its basic word processor.

According to a report by The Verge on Saturday, the tech behemoth will cease updating WordPad and plans to remove it from a future Windows release. Instead, the company proposes the use of Microsoft Word for rich text documents and Windows Notepad for plain text.

The company broke the news through a support note stating, "WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.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."

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The announcement followed the disclosure of Microsoft’s plans to upgrade Notepad with features such as autosave and automatic restoration of tabs. WordPad, which has not received the same amount of attention, was last updated with Windows 7’s Ribbon UI, and has since had no significant updates.

The removal of WordPad is expected to occur in the “future release of Windows,” speculated to be the Windows 12 version anticipated in 2024, loaded with AI-powered features.

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