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 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 Instead the company has simply stated that the software is no longer being updated.
