Why Wordpad is garbage (and freeware is important)

[webfork]

At least once a year I hear how freeware isn't to be trusted and that you can use default programs to do most of your work. For example: Wordpad as a basic text editor and word processor. Well here's some evidence to the contrary:

• 1. Open Wordpad in Windows 7
  
  2. Add some images, add some text (basic stuff)
  
  
  • 
  
  
  3. Save as a DOCX file and then try opening it in basically any other program including Microsoft Word.
  
  
  • 
  
  
  Why not just save to the default RTF (which opens fine in Word and LibreOffice)? RTF saves images with little or no compression, meaning the file is gigantic. A grand total of 5 basic images comes out to 18 megs.
  
  
  

For reference, Outlook.com only lets you attach a 10 meg maximum (according to this site: https://www.outlook-apps.com/maximum-email-size/).

If this seems like a one-off, the history of Microsoft not being able to open it's own formats properly is sort of old news as old Write and Microsoft Works documents haven't be functional in Word going back 10+ years.

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Related:

• Some Wordpad alternatives.

[Specular]

For me the bigger issue is that it messes with the text encoding of the document when saving text files. Some code requires a certain text encoding to be read properly and when edits have been made with Wordpad they can fail (and it's not obvious why to most people). Plain old Notepad on the other hand doesn't have this issue, which is why most user instructions for text file edits suggest using it at the very minimum.

I use it for RTF and that's all it's decent for tbh.