It’s the end of an era: Microsoft is officially killing off WordPad, a basic text-editing app that’s been around since Windows 95.
The tech giant announced this weekend that it’ll deprecate WordPad, meaning it will not be updated and will be removed in a future version of Windows. The app has been auto-installed on Windows systems since 1995, though it has been labeled as an optional feature since 2020.
Microsoft also noted that it has two products, Microsoft Word and Windows NotePad, that can do what most users needed from WordPad.
“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” the company said. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”
