WordPad can format and print text, including font and bold, italic, colored, and centered text, and lacks functions such as a spell checker, thesaurus, and control of pagination. It does not support footnotes and endnotes. WordPad can read, render, and save many Rich Text Format features that it cannot create, such as tables, strikeout, superscript, subscript, "extra" colors, text background colors, numbered lists, right and left indentation, quasi-hypertext and URL linking, and line-spacing greater than 1. Among its advantages are low system-resource usage, simplicity, and speed. Pasting into WordPad from an HTML document, such as a Web page or email, typically automatically converts most or all of it to RTF. WordPad is suited to taking notes; writing letters and stories; and use on various tablets, PCs, and smart phones. It is underpowered for work that relies heavily on graphics and typesetting, such as most publishing-industry requirements for rendering final hard copy. A character not on the keyboard can be entered into Wordpad by typing its hexadecimal code point in Unicode followed by. Likewise, the code point of a character from another application can be determined by copying it into Wordpad followed by. Although WordPad supports RTF it does not support all the features defined in the RTF/Word 2007 specification. Previous versions of WordPad also supported the "Word for Windows 6.0" format, which is forward compatible with the Microsoft Word format. In Windows 95, 98, and 2000, WordPad uses Microsoft's RichEdit control, versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 respectively. In Windows XP SP1 and later, it uses RichEdit 4.1; the same is true in Windows 7. WordPad for Windows XP added full Unicode support, enabling WordPad to support multiple languages, but UTF-16/UCS-2Big Endian is not supported. It can open Microsoft Word files, although it opens newer versions of the.doc format with incorrect formatting. Also, unlike previous WordPad versions, it cannot save files in the.doc format. Files saved as Unicode text are encoded as UTF-16 LE. For the sake of security, Windows XP Service Pack 2 and later versions of Windows and its services packs reduced support for opening .WRI. Windows XP Tablet PC Edition SP2 and Windows Vista include speech recognition, allowing dictation into WordPad. In these and later Windows versions, the RichEdit control exists, making WordPad support extensible third-party services built using the Text Services Framework. In Windows Vista, support for reading Microsoft Word DOC files was removed because of the incorrect rendering and formatting problems, and because a Microsoft security bulletin reported a security vulnerability in opening Word files in WordPad. For viewing older as well as newer documents, Microsoft recommends Word Viewer, which is available free. Native Office Open XML and ODF support was released in the Windows 7 version of WordPad. In Windows 7, the program's user interface was updated to use a ribbon toolbar, similar to those in Microsoft Office. In a 2020 insider build of Windows 10, WordPad is modified to include advertising notifications for the Office web apps as an alternative .
History
WordPad was introduced in Windows 95, replacing Microsoft Write, which came with all previous versions of Windows. The source code to WordPad was also distributed by Microsoft as a Microsoft Foundation Classes sample application with MFC 3.2 and later, shortly before the release of Windows 95. It is still available for download from the MSDN website. The default font used in Windows 95 to Windows Vista was Arial 10; in Windows 7 it was changed to Calibri 11. A similar word processor, also called WordPad, is supplied by some vendors on a Windows CE pre-installation. It has simple functionality like its desktop OS cousin. The icon resembles an early Microsoft Word icon.
