Unfortunately, the official announcement has now arrived, which has already left a bad taste in the mouths of many nostalgics: Windows 11 will no longer have WordPad among the pre-installed programs available to those who use the Microsoft operating system: news that actually started circulating last year but which now even has a certain date. The farewell to the word processing application will take place after 29 years from its first launch by the end of 2024, following the diffusion of the “24H2” update.
The Redmond giant made the official announcement in a support document updated in the last few hours. “WordPad will be removed from all editions of Windows starting from the 24H2 version of Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025″, Microsoft explains to its millions of users. According to some rumours, the update that will give the “coup de grâce” to the program dedicated to word processing and text file editing should be available for download starting next autumn.
As proof of the fact that there will now be no turning back, the preview builds released online no longer show the application. According to what was reported by the expert portal Windows Latesdtany reference to the famous application in the “Start” menu has already disappeared and there is no longer even a trace of the “wordpad.exe” and “wordpadFilter.dll” files, the very same ones which, however, will be useful to most people nostalgic for being able to continue using the program despite everything.
“WordPad will no longer be updated and will be removed from a future Windows release”we read in the note from the Redmond giant. “We recommend Microsoft Word for documents such as .doc and .rtf or Notepad (Notepad) for .txt”. The problem is that while Notepad, recently improved with some new features, is free, the same cannot be said for Wordunless you use the Web version for which authentication via the user's account is required: in any case, however, it cannot be used locally.
This is why, therefore, many are working to find a solution that allows them to continue using WordPad. But how to do it? As explained by some experts on the web, it is sufficient to recover the two files mentioned above, namely “wordpad.exe” and “wordpadFilter.
dll” from the C:Program FilesWindows NTAccessories folder: once copied and saved, it will be possible to use the program in the future too, to the delight of many nostalgic people.