For the first time in 40 years, Windows will ship without built-in word processor - Ars Technica
For the first time in 40 years, Windows will ship without built-in word processor - Ars Technica
WordPad is one of the few built-in apps not to be updated in Windows 11.
cross-posted from !technology@beehaw.org
I can’t recall anymore at which point Microsoft started their efforts to make Windows the most shit as possible , intentionally. I’m not saying Wordpad is something that I use , but… why??????
Permanently Deleted
Their true business now is to rent Microsoft Office. Windows is now just a means to sell people all kinds of services.
BINGO!
I use MS Office 2007 in a Windows XP virtual machine (VirtualBox) on Linux since many years. Zero complaints. There have been technically meaningless changes since 2007 for the OpenXML extended document suite of formats.
Recently I checked the additional benefits of Office versions above 2007.
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2010 gives a Protected View sandboxing feature against macros, and decluttering Ribbon with a Backstage extra menu page to save/share documents.
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2013 brought a new landing page, a comment markup tool to highlight edited portions and integrating OneDrive.
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2016 brought a quick search like tool for doing many complex tasks easily, somewhat like Excel's formula finder. It also has a handwriting feature for formulaic and polynomial equations.
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2019 brought a feature to improve the OneDrive/365 integration by highlighting users who edited a collaboration document. LaTeX was also integrated for math symbols and equations. It brought Dark Mode as well.
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2021 brought mostly further improvements to OneDrive/365 co-authoring and collaboration stuff.
Apart from the LaTeX part, most of it is cosmetic or collaboration features meaningless to me, so I find 2007 pretty great. This also highlights Office was practically feature complete back in 2007, and they are just going to make Office 365 Online their whole business besides Azure Cloud in the future from now on.
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WordPad was always complete garbage lol, and the less preinstalled bloat the better.
It was handy to have as a simple .doc/.docx/.rtf viewer. In my previous job, some of our teams would create documentation written in .docx (eg as part of a application package), or automatic reports generated as .rtf files, and WordPad enabled us to view these docs from secure, locked down servers, without needing to install any addition software (which would increase the attack surface and add unnecessary maintenence overhead).
With MS now getting rid of WordPad, I'd imagine it'll be a bit of a hassle - they would now have to switch to a different native file format (which would be a PITA to convert several hundreds existing files), or install a file viewer or some other app, which would add maintenance overhead.
WordPad wasn't bloat, it was a tiny, executable which didn't depend on any special dlls or frameworks.
You know what's actually bloat? Candy Crush, Bing, Ads in File Explorer and all that MS Store / UWP / "Modern UI" crap that MS keeps pushing out.
Not really
Do stop using windows if it all possible. Fuck ms.
Notepad: am ia joke to you?
That's not a word processor, that's a text editor
Yes, actually.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For apps like Calculator, the changes have been merely cosmetic, but everything from Sound Recorder to Media Player to Paint to the Snipping Tool has gotten some kind of thoughtful redesign and new features, often for the first time in a decade-plus.
The company could decide to keep adding capabilities to Notepad, an app that has been getting substantial attention from Microsoft during the Windows 11 era after many years of neglect.
Or substantial user backlash could make the company reconsider, as it did several years ago when MS Paint was marked as deprecated.
Though it was once slated for removal during the Windows 10 era, Microsoft quietly backtracked a few years later and began adding new features to Paint shortly afterward.
Paint's history is even longer than WordPad's, and there's a history of people putting in lots of time and effort to make complex works of art within the software's limitations; Microsoft's official company accounts certainly don't post screenshots of documents created in WordPad, though.
Like WordPad, Write was meant to fill the gap between the plain-text Notepad and a more fully featured word processor.
The original article contains 541 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I'd say the change in Calculator from W7 to W8 was more than cosmetic. Never have I stared at my 27" 2.5k monitor so stupidly than when I first launched calculator on W8 and that thing blew up over the entire screen with no proper way to leave it on top of other windows.
I think that's when it really had to be clear to everyone that MS has no idea how humans use computers.
I made an autohotkey script years ago that I just run at startup on my machines which lets me press a hotkey to set whatever current window I’m in as “Always On Top.” I forget that it isn’t a baked-in hotkey because it’s so useful.
What about notepad?
That's a text editor, not a word processor
@ijeff, the one I use most is this one right in the browser, it save locally by default in Html (also PDF and Text) and you can copy a webpage in it without loosing the UI and links. Works also great in mobile and as PWA.
All the more reason to stop using microshaft.