291–300 of 367 posts
WordPad was always useful to read RTF files, which used to be pretty common. I guess they have been replaced by PDFs at this stage. Would still be nice if Windows had some sort of basic word processor, as WordPad had functionality that many users would still find useful, basically just fonts and headings.
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It does cost money. Windows licenses aren't free.
Electricity and computer hardware costs money so therefore no software is free and we can wrap up the whole discussion.
One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack. This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus.…
One neat OLE object (btw this works even in Windows 10 - i don't know about 11) is the "package" which allows you to embed any file as an OLE object. So basically you can drop an image file, PDF, video, program or anything else in WordPad and it'll put an icon representing it that if the user double clicks it'd be equivalent to them doubleclicking a file. Of course most of the time it isn't very practical (and WordPa…
This is the sort of non-consensual change that is the hallmark of proprietary software and drives me towards using free and open-source software every chance I get. I love WordPad's simplicity, and I'll miss it.
The opposing reactions (discontent MS did open source something, discontent that they didn't) are odd. I don't fully remember the details there though so can't make a meaningful comment.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-told-were-not-happy-...
> We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf Doesn’t Office require a paid license on top of the Windows license, unlike WordPad?
Install LibreOffice. If you were using WordPad before, LibreOffice will be a fine replacement for your purposes. https://www.libreoffice.org/
WordPad was always useful to read RTF files, which used to be pretty common. I guess they have been replaced by PDFs at this stage. Would still be nice if Windows had some sort of basic word processor, as WordPad had functionality that many users would still find useful, basically just fonts and headings.
pdf and rtf are totally different things. rtf is nearer html - in fact Apple Mail changed from rtf to html in very early OSX possibly 10.3
One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack. This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus.…
I have a story which predates WordPad, but concerns OLE support in it's predecessor Write: At my secondary school, a long time ago now, they used PCs from educational vendor Research Machines (RM). These ran a locked down version of the Windows 3.11 Program Manager which didn't allow you to start any unapproved programs. I discovered you could embed EXEs from a floppy disk as OLE objects in a Write document and then…
I had it on the first computer that I owned and could do all kinds of stuff with it. Aside from Works I also got some version of Visual Basic. I still remember playing around with those programs.
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pbrush also opens Microsoft Paint. (It used to be called Paintbrush.)
> > Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today > pbrush also opens Microsoft Paint. And in both cases, the reason was most probably backwards compatibility, so that programs which directly called WRITE.EXE or PBRUSH.EXE to open a file would keep working. Most of these are going to be 16-bit Windows programs (which AFAIK no longer work, unless you're still running a 32-bit build of Windows), or 32-bit…
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I don't see this as "bullshit", but the opposite: Instead of going from one useful software to zero, we've gone from one to two.
Absolutely true. This is why we have hundreds of Linux distros, which is fine for us who can sort our way through but average users throw their hands up in desperation. I've the same problem in supermarkets when confronted with dozens of brands of an item in that they all seem the same.