Microsoft To Remove WordPad From Windows 11

Last year, Microsoft officially confirmed that it would be removing WordPad from future releases of its Windows operating system, as it was no longer being updated.

Instead, it encouraged users to switch to Microsoft Word for rich text documents or Notepad for plain documents as an alternative to WordPad.

Microsoft To Remove WordPad From Windows 11

For those unaware, WordPad, a free basic word processor, was initially introduced in 1995 along with Windows 95 and has been a part of the Windows operating system for over two decades. However, in 2020, it was downgraded to an optional feature, allowing users to delete WordPad from their system.

“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.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 wrote in an official support note back then announcing the removal.

Now, the Redmond giant plans to remove WordPad from the latest Canary build and has no plans to make it a “reinstallable” feature on Windows 11. Starting with Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26020 for insiders in the Canary channel, users can no longer install WordPad on Windows 11 when they do a clean “fresh installation” of the operating system.

Starting with this build, the WordPad and People apps will no longer be installed after doing a clean install of the OS. In a future flight, WordPad will be removed on upgrade. WordPad will not be reinstallable. WordPad is a deprecated Windows feature. For more information on the future of the People app, click here.

Besides WordPad, Build 26020 also removes the People app. Another Windows feature, the Steps Recorder app (PSR.exe) is also slated to be removed in future versions of Windows. Currently, it is unclear when Microsoft will remove WordPad from Windows 11.