In March, some users of Microsoft"s Notepad app for Windows 11 noticed that there were new toggles in the app"s settings that indicated that the text app would soon be getting spellchecking and autocorrect features. Later, Microsoft started letting members of the Windows Insider Program check out these new Notepad proofreading features.
Now, a few months after the new Notepad features were made available for Insider testers, Tom"s Hardware is reporting that the spellchecking and autocorrect features are beginning to roll out to mainstream users of the app on Windows 11.
Microsoft has, at the time of this writing, not made any official announcements about the new version of Notepad. It"s possible the company may be waiting for the app update to roll out to more users before revealing it in a blog post or social media message.
As with other spellchecking features in text apps, the new features on Notepad for Windows 11 will show red colored lines under words which the spellchecker feature detects as possibly being incorrect. The app also can show autocorrect options for those misspelled words.
Tom"s Hardware indicates that the new spellchecking features in Notepad for Windows 11 are enabled by default. However, users can go into the app"s settings to turn off the feature if they want to.
The new Notepad spellchecking features were added a number of months after Microsoft announced it would deprecate WordPad, its long-running free word processing app. Microsoft will soon remove WordPad from Windows 11 entirely with both the upcoming version 24H2 along with Windows Server 2025, although there is a way to restore the app after it officially goes away.
The new spellchecking features for Notepad for Windows 11 are likely a way for Microsoft to give users a free text editor with some word-processing features that would have been included in the now retired WordPad app.