For the first time, Microsoft word processor Notepad gets spell-check for words—more than 40 years since its launch in 1983. Ronald Reagan was the president, and Ghostbusters was merely a script.
A new Spell-checker has made its way to Notepad on Windows 11, and it works as it does in Word or Edge. It detects misspelled words by underlining them in red. If there is a right-click made on the misspelled word, a suggested correction list pops up, much akin to other Microsoft apps. It also comes with auto-correct capabilities that fix mistakes right as one is typing.
Most interestingly, through the settings menu of Notepad, users can switch off the spellcheck for specific file types. That means formats like .md or .rt won’t have spellcheck turned on over them. Spelling check is also off by default in coding-related file types, such as log files. The process of replacing a spelling mistake takes an additional click in Notepad compared to Word, which had its spellchecker as way back as 1985.
Notepad is getting beefed up because Microsoft’s planning to sunset WordPad in Windows 11 later this year. In the past few months, it has already gained dark mode, tabs, character count, and other stuff that seems to have been willy-nilly added, like a virtual fidget spinner. Now Notepad gets AI with Copilot which raises the bar for the app in quite a way.
That means the addition of spellcheck to Notepad gives this somewhat aged text editor a facelift, filling in the functional gaps between it and other advanced tools, yet remaining at the required level of simplicity and utility.
