To know how prevalent spell check is in any app, after 41 years of being a part of Windows, Notepad has finally been updated by Microsoft with two much-needed features. Because this is where autocorrection and spellcheck come into play. There you can enter text, you might be forgiven for thinking Notepad already had the feature, but it was just added to the app available in Windows 11.
Microsoft announced its addition to Windows 11 in March, and it originally began testing Notepad Correct Spelling for Windows Insiders the following month. However, in the last few days, the wider Windows 11 install base has received the update from Microsoft. You may never have noticed or heard about it in particular – I checked Notepad on my PC and saw that spell checking was enabled, and I didn’t see any semblance of Windows Update.
While spell checking is one of the most important and basic things a word processor can do today, at one time, it was a premium feature that set Microsoft Word apart. In fact, Word didn’t get a spell check feature until the early 1990s, nearly a decade after the program was first developed. Before that point different programs used Oracle’s Co Author to scan the document for errors as you typed and point you to misspelled words.
Notepad, on the other hand, was launched in 1983 as a multi-tool notepad with only limited features, leaving the original Word as a separate version of Notepad. Because the ability to bold and underline text was available only in the multi-tool Notepad. At the time it was released, Notepad stood out due to the fact that it allowed you to interact with the mouse. The program was released with the Microsoft Mouse as a way to show what was possible with what was, at the time, an entirely new input method.
Notepad has gone through a lot of cosmetic changes over the years, but the functionality of this app has not required any changes since it was first introduced. Over the past year, Microsoft has paid a lot of attention to Notepad before it was first introduced. While we still have spellcheck and autocorrect, Microsoft has also added dark mode, tabs and history features to the app, as well as Copilot integration. There have been a lot of feature changes since Microsoft discontinued its WordPad app after almost 30 years.
In earlier times, you could not see this quality in Notepad. But now you’ll see red squiggly lines over misspelled words in Notepad, as well as an option to add unknown words to your dictionary. In Notepad settings, you can turn off spell checking if you want, as well as toggle specific features for different file types. Autocorrect also has a toggle.