News Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2

[Admin]

The Windows 11 24H2 rollout formally removes support for Wordpad as Microsoft formally adds in its deprecated feature, ending its 28 years of product lifespan.

Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2 : Read more

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Why can't MS make WordPad Open Source and let people fork off of it?

They don't want it anymore, let the Open Source community have a crack at improving it.

 

[Dr3ams]

LibreOffice it's opensource and completely free.

 

[artk2219]

Getting rid of control panel would make changing some settings super annoying. I get that you can do most things through settings but sometimes it take more steps or its a pain to get to compared to just getting to what you need to change in control panel.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

LibreOffice it's opensource and completely free.

And Open Office. It would be good for the community to have two open source suites so there is healthy competition.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Which in 2024 is not a big deal. There's LibreOffice and OpenOffice, and online Microsoft Word, as well Google Docs, are free as well.

And yes, while older doesn't mean it's no longer useful, between the available free options which are far more fully featured than Wordpad, I'd say Wordpad has outlived its usefulness.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/get-microsoft-office-free-or-cheap,6348.htm

 

[Dr3ams]

And Open Office. It would be good for the community to have two open source suites so there is healthy competition.

LibreOffice is the successor project to OpenOffice. And you're right opensource competition is the path to better software.

 

[Sam Hobbs]

Why can't MS make WordPad Open Source and let people fork off of it?

They don't want it anymore, let the Open Source community have a crack at improving it.

You are assuming they have not. Your assumption is invalid.

 

[Sam Hobbs]

LibreOffice it's opensource and completely free.

And WordPad. The source code has always been available.

 

[Grobe]

And WordPad. The source code has always been available.

??? This being a typo ?

Anyways, here goes a list of alternatives for wordpad:

https://alternativeto.net/software/wordpad/

 

[bluvg]

There is good reason to petition Microsoft not to do this, but too many of the discussions break down into simplistic "just use Word" (Microsoft's answer) or "use xyz alternative" (fine for personal use and some businesses, but wholly unrealistic for many businesses).

Microsoft seems to think you either just need a plain text editor or full Word, but there is another purpose for WordPad that few outside of specialized business technical support know about: it can be used to repair corrupt Word documents which Word itself refuses to open and repair. My educated guess is that since it supports the .docx format but only a subset of the functionality, it ignores some of the more complex formatting that can cause weird formatting corruption issues that can't readily be fixed by Word itself, or in some cases report a document as corrupt, leaving only the "recover text from any file" option. With WordPad, the same .docx file Word refuses to open can be opened and then saved again, removing the corrupt formatting in the process. Some QC work is necessary afterwards to verify formatting, but this can save many, many hours.

TL;DR: WordPad can be used to avoid missed business deadlines, people getting fired, etc.

 

[8086]

Wordpad consumed a whopping 3.07 Megabytes of drive space. I think MS could be looking in other places to streamline their OS.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

You are assuming they have not. Your assumption is invalid.

I see the source code in Git-Hub now, but I don't see any licensing information about the source code.

Is it free to fork or make use with as I see fit?

 

[cryoburner]

LibreOffice it's opensource and completely free.

That's not exactly the same though. It's a full-fledged word processing application like MS word, complete with crowded menus cluttered with options that the vast majority of people don't need for producing basic documents.
Part of the draw of something like Wordpad is the relative simplicity of its interface, so users can easily locate the most commonly used features, with the application filling a role in-between that of a basic text editor like notepad and a full-fledged office suite. And the fact that it was preinstalled meant that it was guaranteed to be there, without requiring an Internet connection or a relative large install.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

And WordPad. The source code has always been available.

https://github.com/malxau/wordpad

 

[JeffreyP55]

The Windows 11 24H2 rollout formally removes support for Wordpad as Microsoft formally adds in its deprecated feature, ending its 28 years of product lifespan.

Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2 : Read more

From Windows '95 until Windows 1124H2, I have used WordPad maybe twice. Instead I have been donating to LibreOffice for years. It does what I need it to do.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

That's not exactly the same though. It's a full-fledged word processing application like MS word, complete with crowded menus cluttered with options that the vast majority of people don't need for producing basic documents.
Part of the draw of something like Wordpad is the relative simplicity of its interface, so users can easily locate the most commonly used features, with the application filling a role in-between that of a basic text editor like notepad and a full-fledged office suite. And the fact that it was preinstalled meant that it was guaranteed to be there, without requiring an Internet connection or a relative large ….

Last time I used a new feature in Word was in Word 6. The rest of the new stuff to me is simply bloat.

That goes for Word or Libre Office.

Devs, please simplify, give us headings, tables, indents, fonts simple image handling and page numbering…

 

[Dr3ams]

Last time I used a new feature in Word was in Word 6. The rest of the new stuff to me is simply bloat.

That goes for Word or Libre Office.

Devs, please simplify, give us headings, tables, indents, fonts simple image handling and page numbering…

I'm not sure what you guys are talking about. You can configure the interface in LibreOffice Writer the way you want it. Click on View and User Interface and/or View and Toolbars. You can dumb the interface down as much as you want, so you only see what you want to see.