Microsoft's native word processing application, WordPad, is being retired but thankfully there are many free options for a replacement.
That has been okay since Microsoft has a text editing app baked into Windows, or rather, it did.“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt,” Microsoft writes.
The company doesn’t explain why it won’t be updating WordPad anymore but given that Microsoft fired over 10 000 employees this year alone, the company likely wants to focus development resources on its Office products as they generate a profit. The culling of WordPad isn’t great news for anybody who needs a word processor with more functionality than the Notepad app. Thankfully, Microsoft doesn’t have a stranglehold on the office suite market anymore and there is an array of free alternatives.We’ve never quite understood why home users pay for Microsoft Office when LibreOffice exists.