I always thought wordpad was underappreciated
“The company now suggests the Microsoft Word app as a replacement for WordPad users”
uh no, libreoffice works great, thanks for the suggestion tho.
Should replace it with a markdown editor
I’m surprised how slow notepad software is at adopting markdown.
Where nearly every browser based text editor has it built-in
Tbh markdown is not that great… there is always some functionality missing, that some editors implement but then it’s not following a standard format which sucks…
I feel like we should have something better, not at latex level of course but better than markdown.
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Open office and Libre office.
It’s dumb though because WordPad is a very lightweight program for quickly jotting down stuff.
Notepad has always been better than WordPad for quickly jotting stuff down.
I’m sure there’s a use case for WordPad, but I don’t think I’ve ever used it because Notepad.
Notepad for life. If you dont need to do fancy formatting, why would you ever need anything other than plain text?
TED notepad is great. And free too. https://jsimlo.sk/notepad/
honestly, notepad.exe has done what I want and nothing more for 30 years running and there is no reason to look elsewhere
Or you know…piracy 🏴☠️
Why not just promote open source? Unless maybe if you need it for a career. Even if you’re …pirating just boycott that shit, lol.
Agreed. If you’re sharing files in Office file formats, even if you pirated the software, you’re still indirectly promoting their software.
LibreOffice can read and export to Microsoft Office formats. So there’s really no reason to pirate Microsoft Office even if you technically need it for a job (and if the IT guy complains about “non-standard software”, threaten to get him written up by HR for wasting company hours complaining instead of actually doing his job).
Except for those cases where it can’t. There’s always some small, but important, discrepancies. Never have I been able to actually use Libre Writer instead of Word when another party is using Word - same goes for Calc and Excel, sadly. Excel is an absolute UX nightmare for me and I violently hate using it.
I’ve had zero issues loading .doc and .docx files in Writer, and the same goes for .xls and .xlsx files in Calc. The only thing that might have issues is anything with VBS built-in, but that’s not commonly used and I haven’t run into that yet.
I will say that I agree with you on Excel’s UX, but with the caveat that spreadsheet programs in general are just a pain (still better than trying to do anything manually in QuickBooks Online, though).
I wish the whole world would just drop Microsoft office like the bad product it is and went to libre. Yeah, it was innovative when it first hit the scene, but now it’s just become stale and pointlessly expensive.
For me it was powerpoint presentations.
Of all the things to pirate, I think an office suite is probably one of the lameat ones. I tend to be very critical of open source software but the open source office programs I’ve used were perfectly adequate. Not nearly as slick, but fine.
Critical in what way? UX I do understand, but libre/free software is far superior in terms of security and user freedom/choice and for office suites this extends to better compatibility between suites using the .odt (open document) format and whatnot. Lemmy is free/libre software too, and it’s demonstrably better in several ways because of it.
I am broadly talking about most open software I’ve used (not specificallyaiming at Libre office of open office), yes the user interface tends to be shit. Open software tends to be written by programmers and not users of that type of software… this is part of UI but for some software it’s far deeper than that. There’s a disjointed clunkiness of how a user of that software would expect for the program to be laid out that is missing from far too many open software.
And I’ve repeatedly heard terms like “freedom” to describe open software, but what does that even mean when they typically don’t handle common filetypes all that well. Let’s stop pretending that anyone uses ODT. So I have the freedom to not be able to open up a Word or Excel or PowerPoint file and know that the file will come in perfectly fine? Or I have the freedom to save out a file created in Open Office and know it will appear exactly the same way when a colleague opens it in MS Office? We both know there will always be issues making that transition so I wouldn’t exactly feel all that “free” if I was using OO in a work environment.
Open software tends to be written by programmers and not users of that type of software
As opposed to proprietary software, which is written by programmers and not users of that type of software?
As opposed to commercial software which looks at how users actually USE a piece of software. There are probably entire departments of people who specifically are trained at graphic design or user interfaces. People actually study HOW software is used and not just throw together a few commands together and call it a day.
Open Software seems to throw any rando into the mix regardless of their expertise. Just because Bubba used to have a cracked copy of Photoshop when he was in middle school and used it to make GeoCities web pages back in 1998 that doesn’t make him a graphic designer or a user interface expert or an expert in the type of software that is being written.
Technically yes if you use the online version in a browser with an account, but better to just get always free libreoffice and replace the whole works.
Google docs
Wordpad always felt like a transitional between Notepad and Office, but for the average person, the transitional wasn’t needed. If you wanted no frills, notepad was right there. If you needed extras why not just use Office just in case you needed more extras then you thought?
Of course now I use Notepad++ instead of notepad so it fills the Notepad and Wordpad spots.
Well I mean if you wanted something more than notepad and you didn’t want to pay, WordPad was right there… Of course you could install something else but this was included.
Back in the day I used wordpad to edit the various configs for Minecraft mods because it handled
jsonandyamlfiles very well
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shrug I think I might have used wordpad maybe once in my entire life. Once Microsoft Office moved to a subscription model I just switched to OpenOffice, then Apache OpenOffice, and then LibreOffice.
@stefenauris So we have to now subscribe to Office! I use Word Pad. Word pad is automatically installed on my laptop.
If you use wordpad just switch over the Libreoffice. It gas far more features and is already compatible with .RTF files.
Everyday there are more things that fail to separate Windows from its past versions in functionality, but detriment the usability of all the versions to come. Microsoft is changing arbitrary things like this (let’s face it, there aren’t many people truly effected by not having WordPad) just for the sake of changing, not for any foreseeable benefit.
As a LibreOffice, OpenOffice, MS Office 2000, and unfortunately Google Suite user, I’ve seen that there are many effective replacements, so I don’t see this impacting anyone too severely. It’s just stupid.
It actually does make sense. Besides the whole “getting WordPad users to buy Office” thing, there’s also the fact that they won’t have to continue updating WordPad. It’s one less thing to worry about for security and compatibility on their end. The user might not benefit from its removal, but Microsoft does.
Just pointing out that it’s not just for the sake of changing things.
That kinda blows. I won’t pretend I was making heavy use of it when I used to use Windows or anything, but definitely I’d bust it open on occasion when I wanted something with mild enough rich text formatting, but felt LibreOffice Writer felt overkill for whatever I was doing.
notepad++
Notepad++ doesn’t have any form of formatting though, so it’s like underkill for the few narrow things I’d use WordPad for
what sort of formatting?
Bolding, italicizing, I think lists and headers I recall being a thing too
It does allow rich text formatting, it just isn’t enabled by default. And anything it doesn’t do by default once you enable those features, there is probably a plugin to add it.
I wonder if someone will package an installer with it like they did for other classic windows apps like minesweeper and chess, maybe it’ll even be added to that specific Installer. Guess only time will tell.
