Microsoft kills a popular application. It has been with us since Windows 95

Microsoft has published on its official website information about the end of support for the WordPad application. This means that the free text editor will not be further developed.

WordPad will no longer be updated and will be removed in a future version of Windows

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At the same time, Microsoft encourages its WordPad users to switch to a paid one word (For formatted documents such as .doc and .rtf). An alternative – in the case of unformatted documents – is in turn free Notepad,

For people who used WordPad on a daily basis for creating and editing documents, information about the abandonment of this application by Microsoft can be quite a financial challenge. Word, to which the company encourages, is part of the Microsoft 365 packagewhich – as part of the subscription – it costs almost PLN 300 a year.

People who do not want to spend such money can of course use free alternatives to Word and other Microsoft 365 applications (e.g. Excel or PowerPoint). The popular one can be mentioned here LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

WordPad WordPad

Users saved Paint, WordPad’s fate is rather sealed

WordPad is one of the oldest applications for the Microsoft system. For the first time, a free text editor appeared in Windows 95, which premiered almost 30 years ago.

Some hope for WordPad fans may be the story of another iconic application, i.e paint. In 2017, Microsoft announced that they were going to remove this tool from Windows 10 to focus on further development 3D paint. This information caused a storm among users of the system. The criticism of the company’s actions was so great that

WordPad, however, does not have such a large crowd of devoted fans. So it is more likely that it will share the fate of the infamous Internet Explorer, which was removed from Windows in 2021 and replaced by the Microsoft Edge application.