TECH NEWS – After twenty-eight years, Microsoft has decided to banish its word processor from its OS…

A few weeks ago, Windows 11 received an update that banished Cortana, the voice-command assistant, to the digital graveyard. Now, the Redmond-based company is killing off a word processor: those who found Notepad too simple and didn’t want to use (or pay for) Word, part of Microsoft Office, could use WordPad as a workaround, but this loophole will soon be closed.

Microsoft has a page listing deprecated features of the Windows client. WordPad is at the top of the list, and the explanation pretty much describes how nonchalant the company is: “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.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.” So, a departure in Windows 12?

So if you want to open something in .doc, .docx format, you will have to use Word in the future, which is Microsoft’s way of forcing users to buy additional services (Office license…) or subscribe (Office 365…) if they can’t find alternative, free solutions. We’ll name one: LibreOffice Writer. Or even Google Docs can be accessed from your browser with a Google account in no time. The list goes on.

WordPad has been around in operating systems since Windows 95. It took over the baton from Microsoft Write. It had no thesaurus, no spell-check function, and no footnotes, but still, if you received a document in .rtf format, for example, WordPad was the one that was quickly and readily available. It can’t even be said that the program takes up so much space in Windows since it doesn’t need ten megabytes…

So, thank you for banishing another element of the past, Microsoft!

Source: PCGamer