Microsoft is finally killing off WordPad after nearly 30 years

Microsoft is officially killing off WordPad, a basic text-editing app that seemed ripe for the reaper for some time.

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. That meant users could delete it, if they so chose. It seems like that was a harbinger of things to come, considering the news this week.

Microsoft also noted that it has two products, Microsoft Word and Windows NotePad, that can do what most users needed from WordPad.

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"WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows," the company said.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."

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Microsoft has made a habit of killing off some of these classic, if a bit outdated, features. The company killed off, then kind of revived, its classic feature MS Paint a few years back and this year killed off the app for its voice-based assistant Cortana.