Microsoft has announced that it will no longer update WordPad and plans to remove the word processor from a future release of Windows nearly after 30 years.
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“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.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.
Last month, after iOS and Android, Microsoft has now 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.
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.
