Microsoft has announced plans to kill one of the handiest programs in Windows, the Wordpad word-processing app.
A subscription to Office 365 or a one-time purchase of Office or Word can be expensive. And let’s face it, it can be unnecessarily complicated to use. Seriously, look at that top ribbon in Word! Think there are enough options?
Wordpad offers you a simple, basic word processor that’s capable of handling most everyday tasks. Unfortunately, Microsoft says it’s going to stop updating the app and plans to remove it from future releases of Windows, though it doesn’t give an exact timeline.
The company said, “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”
Likely, the move is to encourage folks to either pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription or to use Office apps for free online. Of course, when you use free online office apps, Microsoft gets the benefit of having your information, which is perhaps the hottest commodity in today’s tech world.
If you’re looking for an alternative desktop app, consider LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
WordPad: I agree that Wordpad offers more things you can do and much simpler than Word. Good example is copying an item from an online source and putting it in Wordpad changed the font to a small font. Then you drop it in a document and set the font you need…….