Are you a fervent user of WordPad? Are your company’s finances run through a document only WordPad can deal with? Do you run your Kinder egg smuggling side hustle through WordPad? You better find an alternative, because WordPad has just been deprecated.
WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.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.
A moment of silence for WordPad. It has been included in Windows since Windows 95, as a replacement for Microsoft Write, which was included in Windows from Windows 1.0 until Windows NT 3.51. Definitely a long history, but one has to wonder if this deprecation will actually affect anyone.
Actually forgetten about existence of this program!
The XP version is probably the most perfect incarnation. The ruler is pretty effective, so is the preview.
I do love WordPad XP for being lightweight, fast and effective. Most of my files are in simple RTF when no fancy paging is needed.
Worst is embedding graphics in uncompressed BMP.
Thom Holwerda,
Obviously wordpad was primitive,, like a lite version of word, but it was only redundant if you owned word. If you didn’t though it could actually be quite handy. Wordpad allows people who don’t have the full version of word to create basic documents and read word documents that someone else might have emailed to them. And one could use it to write simple school reports, much better than notepad in this regard.
Even an openoffice user, in the early days, sometimes wordpad would have better compatibility with microsoft’s newfangled document formats.
If memory serves, notepad only could edit small text files. For the big files, you needed wordpad.
Yes. Another option was to pony up for something like UltraEdit. Now most people just use Notepad++
Yes but once Open Office followed by Libre Office showed up on the scene? Stick a fork Wordpad was done. Those that needed more than Notepad and didn’t want to shell out for MS Office went to LO/OO and that was that.
Hell it had been so long since I actually saw anyone at the shop who used wordpad I didn’t even realize the OS still had it, it was always either MS Office or LO/OO or if they just needed .txt good old reliable Notepad. I just looked and its still in Windows 11? Oh Good Lord and it looks like something from 2006, I guess they gave it a facelift sometime in the Vista era. Oh well goodbye Wordpad, something that hadn’t crossed my mind since the days of Windows 98.
“Even an openoffice user, in the early days, sometimes wordpad would have better compatibility with microsoft’s newfangled document formats.”
Wordpad supported only RTF and even today doesn’t support the binary MSO format (doc). In new Windows versions they did eventually add support for (MS) OOXML (docx).
Quikee,
There was a period in which people were sending me OOXML documents I couldn’t open under OO and I didn’t own a copy of office. I don’t remember the specifics, but IIRC microsoft offered a compatibility pack that users could download and use, maybe you needed that? Whatever it was, it worked for me before OO did.
Wordpad supported DOC files in the versions from Windows 95 through Windows XP. Win 95 and Win98 could save DOC file in addition to opening them; XP could not save the format. Vista dropped DOC because of a supposed security issue and some errors in the file translation.
krebizfan,
Informative!
I tested this on windows xp and windows 10. The windows 10 version of wordpad opens .docx files but not .doc files. Version 5.1 that came with the original windows XP opens .doc files but not .docx.
Here is a screenshot on XP.
https://ibb.co/0G406LW
I’m probably one of a very small number of people who still uses Wordpad – I use it to read Word documents on a very lightweight Windows tablet where I have no need for a full-fledged word processor like LibreOffice but do nevertheless find it useful to be able to occasionally open an email attachment sent as a Word document. Ah well, time to research FOSS alternatives, I suppose.
Wordpad is a simple wrapper around the RichEdit control. I hope this isn’t a sign that the RichEdit itself is planned for retirement. I wonder how long the source code for Wordpad sample in the SDK will remain available.