WordPad, the first “rich text editor” shipped with Windows 95, is about to end its career for good, with Microsoft confirming that it will remove it from the next version of Windows 11.
Included with Microsoft’s operating system since the days of Windows 95, WordPad is probably the most frustrating Office alternative possible. It includes enough tools to make you think you can draft documents at a reasonable level, but it never worked well enough that you could get the final document out without going through countless tweaks and improvisations. Perhaps worst of all, documents saved with WordPad almost never look exactly the same in Word, Microsoft’s Premium alternative.
Microsoft has been announcing since last year that WordPad would be “retired”, but now we have a definite timeline for it, with the Windows developer confirming that the WordPad app will not be included with the Windows 11 24H2 overhaul.
“WordPad will be removed from all editions of Windows starting with Windows 11, version 24H2 and Windows Server 2025,” Microsoft says in its statement.
As the name suggests, it is the second half of the current year.
“As a result, Windows will no longer have a built-in default RTF editor. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf, or Notepad for plain text documents such as .txt.”
And for those who don’t want to pay either a subscription or a retail license for the Microsoft Office suite, there are anyway much more capable alternatives than WordPad: Google Docs (accessible online, no installation required), the Libre Office suite or OpenOffice, depending on everyone’s preferences .
Although it sounds like a joke, you could use Notepad as a WordPad alternative, with Microsoft recently announcing that the humble text editor will soon get more advanced text formatting features, including a grammar checker.
