The word processing program WordPad is being discontinued after 28 years. Microsoft announced that Microsoft Word’s “little brother” will no longer receive updates in the future. According to the company, the program will disappear completely from the operating system with a future Windows update.

The company has disclosed in a list which components of Windows will no longer be supported or will disappear from future versions of the system. This list also includes the note: “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future version of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents such as . txt.”

Microsoft is discontinuing WordPad – so the files can still be opened

As early as 2020, Windows users had the option to uninstall WordPad if they wished. At the same time, Microsoft recommended switching to the free web version of Word by displaying relevant information directly in WordPad. With the new update Windows 11 24H2, WordPad finally came to an end after there had previously been problems with Windows 11 versions 23H2 and 11 22H2. In addition to the Office package from Microsoft, the .doc. and also use .rtf with Google Docs or free Office alternatives such as LibreOffice, which means you can save on expensive licenses for Office packages.

How PC world reported, it is alternatively possible to bring back WordPad with the appropriate files from an older version of Windows before 24H2. Accordingly, the folder for Wordpad should still be there in 24H2, but without the wordpad.exe.

The program was released in 1995 with Windows 95 and has a similar cult status to Paint. The 1985 graphics software was also supposed to disappear from the Windows database several times. However, that never happened. After Microsoft deprecated the program in 2017, the May 2019 Update (19H1) added new features and scrapped the previously planned move of the app to the Microsoft Store.