Notepad / Wordpad / Paint
Microsoft Paint
In this lab you will learn the basics of how to use Microsoft Paint to open, edit, and save an image file (such as a scanned image that you create with the scanner, or a image that you draw or paint digitally from scratch).
Microsoft Paint is a simple graphics editing program that is included with Microsoft Windows. Although Paint is not very sophisticated, like the Notepad text editor, you may get stuck someplace where you need to do graphics editing and all that is available is Paint. In addition, the features of Paint are included in most graphics editing programs in more sophisticated form, so learning Paint is a good introduction to other graphics editing programs.
Microsoft Paint can paste any object you put in the clipboard that you take from the Internet, although it will only save in bitmap file format. A nice feature is its ability to locate the pixel position by putting the cursor over the desired position. It can also tell the amount of pixels that an object contains by pointing the cursor to the bottom right of the object. This feature allows users to create objects exactly the size they want them to be.
Microsoft Paint can also reduce the size of an image in two ways. The first is by allowing you to shave off sides of the image. The other is by allowing you to decrease the overall image. Paint will let you select a portion of a picture, too. You can copy it to the clipboard and/or entirely remove it from the original. By opening another Paint application, you can paste that selected image to work on.
Microsoft Paint can flip images horizontally, vertically, or in degrees. This allows a person to edit and/or touch-up the side of any image without having to move the image, possibly causing conflicts in size.
The images you create and edit in paint can be copied and pasted into a Word, PowerPoint, or Web document.
Starting Paint
One way to start Paint from the Desktop is as follows. Select Start > Programs > Accessories > Paint. The executable file for Paint is pbrush.exe and is located in the Windows directory, usually C:\WINDOWS.
The Menus
Knowing how to use menu commands is a basic Windows skill. But just in case you’re a real beginner, we’ll do a quick recap.
The Menus appear directly beneath the Title Bar in the window. There are six menus in the Paint window, which I’ve circled in red to emphasize.
They are called "Menus" because they work like a menu at a fast food restaurant. When you want to place an order at a restaurant, you look up on the wall for what you want, and if you see it, then you select it. The computer works the same way. You just look in the menu, then select the item that you want. Because a complete list of all the items on the menu would take up a lot of screen space that could be better used for other things, the menu items "hide" most of the time. To bring up a menu in its entirety, just click on the Menu’s heading, and the rest of the menu will "pull down". To learn more about the menu bar, follow this link: menus.
The Drawing area
When started, Paint displays a default drawing area which is called the canvas.
The ToolbarMicrosoft Paint has an assortment of painting Tools that you can use for drawing shapes and applying color to areas of your image in various ways. You switch between tools by clicking on the appropriate Icon on the Toolbar, which is located on the left side of the Paint window. The toolbox is a floating toolbar that contains icons that change the mode of the program.
By default, the Pencil mode is active.
To toggle the toolbox on and off, select Tools > Tool Box (shortcut Ctrl-T).
The Toolbar Buttons To learn more about what each button does, click on the hyperlinks below:
Line Tool
Eraser/Color Eraser
Curve Tool
Fill with Color
Rectangle
Pick Color
Polygon
Magnifier
Ellipse
Pencil
Rounded Rectangle
Paint Brush
Free-form Select
Airbrush
Select
Text tool
The Color Palette
To select the color you’re working with, you use the Color Palette. The Color Palette is a part of the main Paint window, and looks like this:
The box on the left side shows the active colors.
The top, overlapping rectangle (currently black) is the foreground color. The foreground color is the color that will be used by the following Tools: Text, Pencil, Paintbrush, Airbrush, Fill, Shapes, Line, and Curve. To change the foreground color, click on the desired color in the Color Palette with the left button on your mouse. The bottom rectangle is the background color. The background color is the default color of any new image that you create. When you use the Eraser tool, the Eraser turns whatever you erase back to the background color. To change the background color, click on the desired color in the Color Palette with the right button on your mouse. Usually, you’ll want to leave the background color alone, but occasionally you may want to make it some color other than white.
Tip: The background is also a secondary color for certain tools, such as the shapes tools. If you set the tool options for the shapes to draw filled shapes, the fill color will be the background color.
Tip: The background color can also be used by the tools if you draw using the right button on the mouse instead of the left button. That way, you can switch quickly between two colors that you are using frequently.
You might think that the selection of colors available on this color palette is rather limited, and you’d be right. In order to gain access to a greater variety of colors, you’ll want to use the Color Picker. We’ll go over this when we talk about the Colors Menu.
Line drawing tips
The "Line" button is used to to draw a straight line. Select the "Line" button from the toolbox. Select a line width at the bottom of the toolbox. Choose a color for the line. Draw a line on the canvas.
The Freeform Select tool tips
To use the freeform select tool, click on its Icon. With the left button, click on your image wherever you want to begin the selection. Drag the mouse around to create the outline of the freeform shape of your selection. Be careful! The mouse is tricky to use. It may help to zoom in using the Magnifying Glass tool. Zoom in close so you can see what you’re working with more clearly, and to control the mouse with better precision.
When you finish outlining your freeform selection shape, release the mouse button. You will notice that the freeform shape that you had been drawing has just mysteriously turned into a rectangle! What gives? Actually, your freeform shape is still preserved; the selection, however, is outlined in a rectangular-shaped guide box. The freeform selection is bounded within this box. If you move the selected portion of the image around, you’ll notice that it still retains the freeform shape that you drew. This may confuse you at first, but you’ll get used to it before long.
The Rectangle Select tool tips
To use the Rectangle Select tool, Click on the Rectangle Select tool Icon. With the left button, click and hold the button to begin your selection. Where you click will become one of the corners of the rectangular selection area.
Drag the mouse diagonally to where you want the opposite corner of the rectangular area to be. Release the mouse button. The Rectangular selection will also have a rectangular shaped guide box around it.
Things you can do with the selected area:
At times you may need to capture pictures of pages (screens), or parts of screens. These can be used to illustrate screens or parts of screens your user may need for a variety of purposes. After a screen is captured and saved as a file.... editing software may be used to modify the capture as needed. When you take a screen shot, you are literally taking a shot of how your screen looks, including any programs visible, layout of the desktop, a snapshot of a live chat room ...whatever you have open. To take a snap shot:
This image was captured using Print Screen
This image was captured using Alt + Print Screen
Example: What can you do with Paint?
Using selections to combine two separate images. This example uses selections in several ways to achieve interesting results. This page uses a lot of graphics to show step-by-step the procedures used in using the Selection Tools, so I've set it up as a separate page, to decrease the amount of time it takes to download.
Conclusions
Even though MS Paint is a very limited graphics program, it is capable of doing some useful tricks. It is perhaps most useful as an tool for introducing new users to working with graphics programs, as its simplicity and small size makes it easier to learn. Much of what you have learned in using Paint can be usefully applied to learning to use other, more sophisticated graphics programs.
Additional Reseources
Notepad (software)
NotepadA component of Microsoft Windows
Notepad on Windows 8
DetailsTypeText editorIncluded withAll Microsoft Windows versionsRelated componentsWordPadNotepad is a simple text editor for Microsoft Windows. It has been included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 1.0 in 1985.
Contents [hide]
Features[edit]Notepad is a common text-only (plain text) editor. The resulting files—typically saved with the .txt extension—have no format tags or styles, making the program suitable for editing system files to use in a DOS environment and, occasionally, source code for later compilation or execution, usually through a command prompt. It is also useful for its negligible use of system resources; making for quick load time and processing time, especially on under-powered hardware. Notepad supports both left-to-right and right-to-left based languages. Unlike WordPad, Notepad does not treat newlines in Unix- or Mac-style text files correctly. Notepad offers only the most basic text manipulation functions, such as finding text. Only newer versions of Windows include an updated version of Notepad with a search and replace function. However, it has much less functionality in comparison to full-scale editors.
Microsoft's first Notepad version predates Windows. They included it in a set of utilities they bundled with the Microsoft Mouse as early as 1983.[1] Like subsequent versions, it was a plain text editor that used the mouse for menu navigation and text manipulation. However, unlike its Windows successors, it was a DOS program limited to full-screen operation.
In all versions of Windows, Notepad uses a built-in window class named EDIT. Older versions included with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows 3.1, imposed a 64 K limit on file size, which an operating system limit of the EDIT class.
Up to Windows 95, Fixedsys was the only available display font for Notepad. Windows NT 4.0 and 98 introduced the ability to change this font. As of Windows 2000, the default font was changed to Lucida Console. The font setting, however, only affects how the text is shown to the user and how it is printed, not how the file is saved to disk. The default font was changed to Consolas on Windows 8.
Up to Windows Me, there were almost no keyboard shortcuts and no line-counting feature. Starting with Windows 2000, shortcuts for common tasks like new, open and save were added, as well as a status-bar with a line counter (available only when word-wrap is disabled).
In the Windows NT-based versions of Windows, Notepad can edit traditional 8-bit text files as well as Unicode text files (both UTF-8 and UTF-16, and in case of UTF-16, both little-endian and big-endian).
Notepad also has a simple built-in logging function. Each time a file that starts with .LOG is opened, the program inserts a text timestamp on the last line of the file.[2][3]
Notepad accepts text from the Windows clipboard. When clipboard data with multiple formats is pasted into Notepad, the program only accepts text in the CF_TEXT format.[4] This is useful for stripping embedded font type and style codes from formatted text, such as when copying text from a web page and pasting into an email message or other WYSIWYGtext editor. Formatted text can be temporarily pasted into Notepad, and then immediately copied again in stripped format to paste into the other program.
Notepad can print files, but doesn't print correctly if Word Wrap is turned on. Headers, footers, and margins can be set and adjusted when preparing to print a file under Page Setup. The date, file name, and other information can be placed in the headers and footers with various codes consisting of an ampersand ('&') followed by a letter..
WordPad
WordPadA component of Microsoft Windows
WordPad on Windows 7
DetailsTypeWord processor and Text editorIncluded withWindows 95 and higherReplacesMicrosoft WriteRelated componentsNotepadWordPad is a basic word processor that is included with almost all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onwards. It is more advanced than Notepad but simpler than Microsoft Works Word Processor and Microsoft Word. It replaced Microsoft Write.
Contents [hide]
Features[edit]WordPad can format and print text, including fonts, bold, italic, colored, and centered text, etc., but lacks intermediate features such as a spell checker, thesaurus, and the creation of tables. However WordPad can read, render, and save many RTF features that it cannot create such as tables, strikeout, superscript, subscript, "extra" colors, text background colors, numbered lists, right or left indent, quasi-hypertext and URL linking, and various line spacings. Among its advantages are low system-resource usage, simplicity, and speediness. Pasting into or from an HTML document such as from the internet or email typically will automatically convert most or all of it to RTF (although this is partially browser-dependent). As such, WordPad is well suited for taking notes, writing letters and stories, or for usage in various tablets, PCs, and smart phones. However, WordPad is underpowered for work that relies heavily on graphics or typesetting such as most publishing-industry requirements for rendering final hard copy.
WordPad natively supports the Rich Text Format, though 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 compatiblewith the Microsoft Word format[citation needed].
In Windows 95, 98 and Windows 2000, it used Microsoft's RichEdit control, versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 respectively.[1] In Windows XP SP1 and later, it uses RichEdit 4.1,[2] including Windows 7.[3]
WordPad for Windows XP added full Unicode support, enabling WordPad to support multiple languages, but UTF-16/UCS-2 Big Endian is not supported. It can open Microsoft Word (versions 6.0-2003) files[citation needed], 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 (only .txt or .rtf).Windows XP Service Pack 2 onwards reduced support for opening .WRI files for security purposes.
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition SP2 and Windows Vista include speech recognition, and therefore dictation into WordPad is possible. In these and later Windows versions, the RichEdit control was added and as a result, WordPad now supports extensible third-party services (such as grammar and spell check) built using the Text Services Framework(TSF).[4]
In Windows Vista, support for reading Microsoft Word DOC files was removed because of the incorrect rendering and formatting problems, as well as a Microsoft security bulletin that reported a security vulnerability in opening Word files in WordPad.[5] For viewing older (97-2003) as well as newer (Office Open XML) documents, Microsoft recommendsWord Viewer, which is available for free. Native Office Open XML and ODF support was released in the Windows 7 version of WordPad.[6][7]
Microsoft has updated the user interface for WordPad in Windows 7, giving it an Office 2010-style ribbon that replaces the application menu and toolbars. Other bundled Windows applications such as Paint have had similar interface makeovers.[8]
In this lab you will learn the basics of how to use Microsoft Paint to open, edit, and save an image file (such as a scanned image that you create with the scanner, or a image that you draw or paint digitally from scratch).
Microsoft Paint is a simple graphics editing program that is included with Microsoft Windows. Although Paint is not very sophisticated, like the Notepad text editor, you may get stuck someplace where you need to do graphics editing and all that is available is Paint. In addition, the features of Paint are included in most graphics editing programs in more sophisticated form, so learning Paint is a good introduction to other graphics editing programs.
Microsoft Paint can paste any object you put in the clipboard that you take from the Internet, although it will only save in bitmap file format. A nice feature is its ability to locate the pixel position by putting the cursor over the desired position. It can also tell the amount of pixels that an object contains by pointing the cursor to the bottom right of the object. This feature allows users to create objects exactly the size they want them to be.
Microsoft Paint can also reduce the size of an image in two ways. The first is by allowing you to shave off sides of the image. The other is by allowing you to decrease the overall image. Paint will let you select a portion of a picture, too. You can copy it to the clipboard and/or entirely remove it from the original. By opening another Paint application, you can paste that selected image to work on.
Microsoft Paint can flip images horizontally, vertically, or in degrees. This allows a person to edit and/or touch-up the side of any image without having to move the image, possibly causing conflicts in size.
The images you create and edit in paint can be copied and pasted into a Word, PowerPoint, or Web document.
Starting Paint
One way to start Paint from the Desktop is as follows. Select Start > Programs > Accessories > Paint. The executable file for Paint is pbrush.exe and is located in the Windows directory, usually C:\WINDOWS.
The Menus
Knowing how to use menu commands is a basic Windows skill. But just in case you’re a real beginner, we’ll do a quick recap.
The Menus appear directly beneath the Title Bar in the window. There are six menus in the Paint window, which I’ve circled in red to emphasize.
They are called "Menus" because they work like a menu at a fast food restaurant. When you want to place an order at a restaurant, you look up on the wall for what you want, and if you see it, then you select it. The computer works the same way. You just look in the menu, then select the item that you want. Because a complete list of all the items on the menu would take up a lot of screen space that could be better used for other things, the menu items "hide" most of the time. To bring up a menu in its entirety, just click on the Menu’s heading, and the rest of the menu will "pull down". To learn more about the menu bar, follow this link: menus.
The Drawing area
When started, Paint displays a default drawing area which is called the canvas.
The ToolbarMicrosoft Paint has an assortment of painting Tools that you can use for drawing shapes and applying color to areas of your image in various ways. You switch between tools by clicking on the appropriate Icon on the Toolbar, which is located on the left side of the Paint window. The toolbox is a floating toolbar that contains icons that change the mode of the program.
By default, the Pencil mode is active.
To toggle the toolbox on and off, select Tools > Tool Box (shortcut Ctrl-T).
The Toolbar Buttons To learn more about what each button does, click on the hyperlinks below:
Line Tool
Eraser/Color Eraser
Curve Tool
Fill with Color
Rectangle
Pick Color
Polygon
Magnifier
Ellipse
Pencil
Rounded Rectangle
Paint Brush
Free-form Select
Airbrush
Select
Text tool
The Color Palette
To select the color you’re working with, you use the Color Palette. The Color Palette is a part of the main Paint window, and looks like this:
The box on the left side shows the active colors.
The top, overlapping rectangle (currently black) is the foreground color. The foreground color is the color that will be used by the following Tools: Text, Pencil, Paintbrush, Airbrush, Fill, Shapes, Line, and Curve. To change the foreground color, click on the desired color in the Color Palette with the left button on your mouse. The bottom rectangle is the background color. The background color is the default color of any new image that you create. When you use the Eraser tool, the Eraser turns whatever you erase back to the background color. To change the background color, click on the desired color in the Color Palette with the right button on your mouse. Usually, you’ll want to leave the background color alone, but occasionally you may want to make it some color other than white.
Tip: The background is also a secondary color for certain tools, such as the shapes tools. If you set the tool options for the shapes to draw filled shapes, the fill color will be the background color.
Tip: The background color can also be used by the tools if you draw using the right button on the mouse instead of the left button. That way, you can switch quickly between two colors that you are using frequently.
You might think that the selection of colors available on this color palette is rather limited, and you’d be right. In order to gain access to a greater variety of colors, you’ll want to use the Color Picker. We’ll go over this when we talk about the Colors Menu.
Line drawing tips
The "Line" button is used to to draw a straight line. Select the "Line" button from the toolbox. Select a line width at the bottom of the toolbox. Choose a color for the line. Draw a line on the canvas.
- Use the left mouse button to draw with the foreground color.
- Use the right mouse button to draw with the backbround color.
- To draw perfectly horizontal, vertical, or 45 degree angle lines, press and hold the Shift key while drawing the line.
The Freeform Select tool tips
To use the freeform select tool, click on its Icon. With the left button, click on your image wherever you want to begin the selection. Drag the mouse around to create the outline of the freeform shape of your selection. Be careful! The mouse is tricky to use. It may help to zoom in using the Magnifying Glass tool. Zoom in close so you can see what you’re working with more clearly, and to control the mouse with better precision.
When you finish outlining your freeform selection shape, release the mouse button. You will notice that the freeform shape that you had been drawing has just mysteriously turned into a rectangle! What gives? Actually, your freeform shape is still preserved; the selection, however, is outlined in a rectangular-shaped guide box. The freeform selection is bounded within this box. If you move the selected portion of the image around, you’ll notice that it still retains the freeform shape that you drew. This may confuse you at first, but you’ll get used to it before long.
The Rectangle Select tool tips
To use the Rectangle Select tool, Click on the Rectangle Select tool Icon. With the left button, click and hold the button to begin your selection. Where you click will become one of the corners of the rectangular selection area.
Drag the mouse diagonally to where you want the opposite corner of the rectangular area to be. Release the mouse button. The Rectangular selection will also have a rectangular shaped guide box around it.
Things you can do with the selected area:
- Copy or Cut and Paste: To copy the selection, press Ctrl-C. To cut the selection from the image, press Ctrl-X. After Copying or Cutting, you can Paste the selection by pressing Ctrl-V. By Pasting multiple times, you can achieve a mosaic or collage-like effect.
- Move: Left-click anywhere inside the guidebox and hold down the button to "pick up" the selection, and then drag the mouse to move the selection to another area of the image. It will "float" over the rest of the image, allowing you to position it wherever you want it to be. Release the mouse button to "let go" of the selection.
- Stretch: The guide box around your selection can be re-sized. You can resize by clicking on the square-shaped tabs located at the corners and the middle sections of the guide box, holding the mouse button down, and then dragging the mouse to change the size of the selection. Release the mouse button when the selection is the size you want it to be. You can make it bigger or smaller, and achieve a distorted effect by "squashing" or "stretching" the selection to make it either wider/narrower or taller/shorter than its original proportions.
- Apply Effects: You can apply any of the effects from the Image Menu directly to the active selection rather than to the whole image.
- De-selecting the area: To de-select the area, either activate a different tool by clicking on it in the tool bar, or make a new selection. You can’t have more than one selection active at a time. Once the selection is de-selected, it becomes part of the image again, and will cover over whatever it may have been laying over.
At times you may need to capture pictures of pages (screens), or parts of screens. These can be used to illustrate screens or parts of screens your user may need for a variety of purposes. After a screen is captured and saved as a file.... editing software may be used to modify the capture as needed. When you take a screen shot, you are literally taking a shot of how your screen looks, including any programs visible, layout of the desktop, a snapshot of a live chat room ...whatever you have open. To take a snap shot:
- Make sure you have the screen looking the way you want it to appear in the image (i.e. Have the right window open),
- Press the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard,
- Open a graphics package (e.g. Microsoft Paint),
- Go up to the "Edit" menu and select "Paste",
- Resize the image or select certain parts ...manipulate the image however you like
- Save your image (save your image in JPG or GIF format).
This image was captured using Print Screen
This image was captured using Alt + Print Screen
Example: What can you do with Paint?
Using selections to combine two separate images. This example uses selections in several ways to achieve interesting results. This page uses a lot of graphics to show step-by-step the procedures used in using the Selection Tools, so I've set it up as a separate page, to decrease the amount of time it takes to download.
Conclusions
Even though MS Paint is a very limited graphics program, it is capable of doing some useful tricks. It is perhaps most useful as an tool for introducing new users to working with graphics programs, as its simplicity and small size makes it easier to learn. Much of what you have learned in using Paint can be usefully applied to learning to use other, more sophisticated graphics programs.
Additional Reseources
- Sample Lesson Using MS Paint
- Digital Imaging for Educators
- Copying and Editing a Screen Image with Paint
- Basic Computer Graphics for Teachers
- Microsoft's Clip Gallery Live
Notepad (software)
NotepadA component of Microsoft Windows
Notepad on Windows 8
DetailsTypeText editorIncluded withAll Microsoft Windows versionsRelated componentsWordPadNotepad is a simple text editor for Microsoft Windows. It has been included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 1.0 in 1985.
Contents [hide]
Features[edit]Notepad is a common text-only (plain text) editor. The resulting files—typically saved with the .txt extension—have no format tags or styles, making the program suitable for editing system files to use in a DOS environment and, occasionally, source code for later compilation or execution, usually through a command prompt. It is also useful for its negligible use of system resources; making for quick load time and processing time, especially on under-powered hardware. Notepad supports both left-to-right and right-to-left based languages. Unlike WordPad, Notepad does not treat newlines in Unix- or Mac-style text files correctly. Notepad offers only the most basic text manipulation functions, such as finding text. Only newer versions of Windows include an updated version of Notepad with a search and replace function. However, it has much less functionality in comparison to full-scale editors.
Microsoft's first Notepad version predates Windows. They included it in a set of utilities they bundled with the Microsoft Mouse as early as 1983.[1] Like subsequent versions, it was a plain text editor that used the mouse for menu navigation and text manipulation. However, unlike its Windows successors, it was a DOS program limited to full-screen operation.
In all versions of Windows, Notepad uses a built-in window class named EDIT. Older versions included with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows 3.1, imposed a 64 K limit on file size, which an operating system limit of the EDIT class.
Up to Windows 95, Fixedsys was the only available display font for Notepad. Windows NT 4.0 and 98 introduced the ability to change this font. As of Windows 2000, the default font was changed to Lucida Console. The font setting, however, only affects how the text is shown to the user and how it is printed, not how the file is saved to disk. The default font was changed to Consolas on Windows 8.
Up to Windows Me, there were almost no keyboard shortcuts and no line-counting feature. Starting with Windows 2000, shortcuts for common tasks like new, open and save were added, as well as a status-bar with a line counter (available only when word-wrap is disabled).
In the Windows NT-based versions of Windows, Notepad can edit traditional 8-bit text files as well as Unicode text files (both UTF-8 and UTF-16, and in case of UTF-16, both little-endian and big-endian).
Notepad also has a simple built-in logging function. Each time a file that starts with .LOG is opened, the program inserts a text timestamp on the last line of the file.[2][3]
Notepad accepts text from the Windows clipboard. When clipboard data with multiple formats is pasted into Notepad, the program only accepts text in the CF_TEXT format.[4] This is useful for stripping embedded font type and style codes from formatted text, such as when copying text from a web page and pasting into an email message or other WYSIWYGtext editor. Formatted text can be temporarily pasted into Notepad, and then immediately copied again in stripped format to paste into the other program.
Notepad can print files, but doesn't print correctly if Word Wrap is turned on. Headers, footers, and margins can be set and adjusted when preparing to print a file under Page Setup. The date, file name, and other information can be placed in the headers and footers with various codes consisting of an ampersand ('&') followed by a letter..
WordPad
WordPadA component of Microsoft Windows
WordPad on Windows 7
DetailsTypeWord processor and Text editorIncluded withWindows 95 and higherReplacesMicrosoft WriteRelated componentsNotepadWordPad is a basic word processor that is included with almost all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onwards. It is more advanced than Notepad but simpler than Microsoft Works Word Processor and Microsoft Word. It replaced Microsoft Write.
Contents [hide]
Features[edit]WordPad can format and print text, including fonts, bold, italic, colored, and centered text, etc., but lacks intermediate features such as a spell checker, thesaurus, and the creation of tables. However WordPad can read, render, and save many RTF features that it cannot create such as tables, strikeout, superscript, subscript, "extra" colors, text background colors, numbered lists, right or left indent, quasi-hypertext and URL linking, and various line spacings. Among its advantages are low system-resource usage, simplicity, and speediness. Pasting into or from an HTML document such as from the internet or email typically will automatically convert most or all of it to RTF (although this is partially browser-dependent). As such, WordPad is well suited for taking notes, writing letters and stories, or for usage in various tablets, PCs, and smart phones. However, WordPad is underpowered for work that relies heavily on graphics or typesetting such as most publishing-industry requirements for rendering final hard copy.
WordPad natively supports the Rich Text Format, though 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 compatiblewith the Microsoft Word format[citation needed].
In Windows 95, 98 and Windows 2000, it used Microsoft's RichEdit control, versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 respectively.[1] In Windows XP SP1 and later, it uses RichEdit 4.1,[2] including Windows 7.[3]
WordPad for Windows XP added full Unicode support, enabling WordPad to support multiple languages, but UTF-16/UCS-2 Big Endian is not supported. It can open Microsoft Word (versions 6.0-2003) files[citation needed], 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 (only .txt or .rtf).Windows XP Service Pack 2 onwards reduced support for opening .WRI files for security purposes.
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition SP2 and Windows Vista include speech recognition, and therefore dictation into WordPad is possible. In these and later Windows versions, the RichEdit control was added and as a result, WordPad now supports extensible third-party services (such as grammar and spell check) built using the Text Services Framework(TSF).[4]
In Windows Vista, support for reading Microsoft Word DOC files was removed because of the incorrect rendering and formatting problems, as well as a Microsoft security bulletin that reported a security vulnerability in opening Word files in WordPad.[5] For viewing older (97-2003) as well as newer (Office Open XML) documents, Microsoft recommendsWord Viewer, which is available for free. Native Office Open XML and ODF support was released in the Windows 7 version of WordPad.[6][7]
Microsoft has updated the user interface for WordPad in Windows 7, giving it an Office 2010-style ribbon that replaces the application menu and toolbars. Other bundled Windows applications such as Paint have had similar interface makeovers.[8]