WordPad users are trying to save it from being removed by Microsoft. Maybe everything will work out

So many years have passed, why now?

The fact is that Microsoft usually simply transferred the same version of WordPad from one version of its OS to another. Moreover, even Notepad was updated in Windows 11, but they forgot about WordPad. Perhaps this shows the company’s attitude towards the text editor.

Be that as it may, WordPad has been an integral part of the Windows operating system for a long time. The situation changed only in 2020. Then an update was released for Windows 10, which gave users the ability to uninstall WordPad.

At the moment, this text editor is quite functional – it is a very simplified version of Word, but a very fast version, which also consumes very few system resources. And virtually no Internet connection is required, unlike most modern office suites.

However, the number of users who continue to actively, rather than occasionally, work with WordPad is quite small. Therefore, Microsoft does not see much point in again transferring outdated software to a new version of Windows.

There are not many users, but they are active

Over the past few days, thousands of people have spoken out against the removal of WordPad. They did this both by contacting the company’s technical support and by writing comments on Feedback Hub, a service of Microsoft itself.

It is clear that someone expresses dissatisfaction on their own social networks, but such appeals remain a voice in the desert. But the mountain of comments on Microsoft’s official resources is another matter; the company listens to them. Moreover, commentators justify their protest by the fact that they are accustomed to the high speed of the editor’s work.

It doesn’t have many tools, but it has a lot more than Notepad. Many people are satisfied with the basic formatting and text processing capabilities provided by WordPad. Well, since the editor is minimalistic, it loads in a second, loading even large documents is also very fast. Of course, WordPad does not work with all formats, but if it does support one, there are no lags.

Users claim that Notepad is not suitable for work, since you can only type text there – with virtually no formatting, without tables or images. But WordPad allows you to do all this.

“I use WordPad for RTF files because it loads faster than MS Word. I take reference notes in RTF format because Notepad doesn’t support text formatting. Please add WordPad to the Microsoft Store like you did with MS Paint when it was deprecated on Windows.” it says in a comment one of the users left in the Microsoft Feedback Center.

“I often use RTF for simple documents because they are not heavy. Just yesterday I used WordPad to create and record a list of steps to complete a work task on a server. This is great when you don’t need a big program and you’re not online. This is the only built-in tool that allows you to put text and images in one document,” another user added.

“Using WordPad, I can easily create RTF email signatures without any extra unnecessary details. If you do the same thing in Word, the file will be much larger,” another user said.

Are there any precedents?

If we are talking about the fact that Microsoft decided to leave products in Windows that it planned to remove, then yes, there are. For example, Microsoft has been trying to replace the Control Panel with the Settings tool for a long time. But since the latter is a stripped-down version of the Control Panel, users began to leave thousands of comments, strongly opposing such a replacement. There are also some funny things with this “replacement”: for example, when setting advanced power settings, Windows transfers the user from “Settings” to “Control Panel”.

A little earlier, Microsoft was going to remove from Explorer some functions that have long been familiar to all of us. It was supposed to remove, for example, settings for administering files and folders, the ability to view hidden files and folders, etc. After this step, there was so much negativity that the corporation abandoned the plans. One can only be surprised that Microsoft even decided to do something like this.

What’s the plan?

According to Microsoft’s announcement, WordPad will soon be removed from Windows. This will be done after the next Windows 11 update, despite suggestions that the tool will be removed in Windows 12, which is actively being developed. To replace WordPad, Microsoft representatives recommend using Microsoft Word for documents in doc and rtf formats, as well as Notepad for simple text documents, such as files with the txt extension.

But if the “uprising” of users continues, and so far it is, then, most likely, Microsoft will be forced to leave the component as part of the operating system.