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UPDATE 10/3/24: It's time to say goodbye. With this week's Windows 11 2024 update, WordPad has officially made its way to Microsoft's list of deprecated features.
"WordPad is removed from all editions of Windows starting in Windows 11, version 24H2 and Windows Server 2025," Microsoft says on its support site. "We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt."
As ExtremeTech notes, Notepad is still getting updates, like spell-check and auto-correct, perhaps as a consolation prize, "but it has nowhere near WordPad's overall feature set." If you want Word, Microsoft 365 is $69.99 per year, and Office 2024 is now available for a one-time purchase.
UPDATE 3/29/24: Microsoft has confirmed that WordPad will be removed from Windows with the Windows 11 version 24H2 update later this year.
With that rollout, "WordPad will be removed from all editions of Windows," Microsoft says. "As a result, Windows will no longer have a built-in, default RTF reader. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Notepad for plain text documents like .txt."
We don't have a firm date for the release of Windows 11 24H2; the last three "H2" updates launched in September and October, so we'll likely see it (and the demise of WordPad) sometime this fall.
Original Story 9/2/23:
Microsoft is finally saying farewell to WordPad.
The company announced Friday that it plans to deprecate WordPad with a future Windows update, although it didn’t announce specific timing for the change, Bleeping Computer reports.
WordPad has been installed by default on Windows computers since the launch of Windows 95. The program offers users a basic word processor and document editor.
Microsoft recommends that users turn to Microsoft Word for “rich text documents like.doc and .rtf” and Windows Notepad “for plain text documents like .txt.” (Access to Word requires users to have an annual or monthly subscription to Microsoft 365.)
WordPad has been offered as an optional Windows feature since the Windows 10 Insider Build 19551, which was released in February 2020. While the program was installed on computers by default, users could uninstall it if they’d like through Windows’s “Optional features” control panel.
Last month, Microsoft announced plans to kill off another Windows mainstay: Cortana. The company initially announced plans to remove support for Cortana in Windows in June; however, later pushed the date to “late 2023” before officially killing it off in early August.
At the time of its demise, Microsoft announced Cortana will “continue to be available in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams rooms.”
Microsoft has not announced any plans for users to continue to access WordPad. Instead the company has simply stated that the software is no longer being updated.
Emily Price contributed to this story.