Time to Type - A Quick Introduction to Notepad and Wordpad.
Page 2. By Matt Western.

WordPad.

WordPad is similar to Notepad only in that it comes bundled with Windows and that it is not as powerful as Word.

However WordPad is more powerful (has more features) than Notepad.

WordPad allows you to copy images into (insert or paste) a document. This is a big step up from Notepad which only allows you to copy text.

WordPad also allows you to format the text within your document. What this means in real life is that you can use different fonts and colours for your text within the one document, unlike Notepad that allows you to only use a single font for the entire document.

With WordPad you can also use bullet points to highlight points or lines of text, you can also right align, left align and centre your text.

Other features include being able to underline, bold and italicize your text.

When you save your document you can select to save it in text format or rich text format (RTF). Rich text format is a standard that was developed by Microsoft. Files saved in RTF are actually normal ASCII files but contain additional information such as the type of font specified, text colour, margin placements etc.

WordPad is not a powerful editor like Word but it is an extremely useful and capable text editing tool.

Here are some features found within WordPad that are not available in Notepad.

Print Preview.
This feature allows you to take a look at what your document will look like before you print it. You can check out your paragraphs, where you've inserted images and other similar things.

Paste Special
The Paste Special feature allows you to 'link' to information contained within another file that has been created with a program that also supports the Paste Special function.

For example, you may have some data in Microsoft Excel that you want to include in your WordPad document.

This data may need to be changed from time to time and you want your WordPad document to stay up to date and reflect those changes. The Paste Special function allows you to do this.

The Paste Special function uses a technology called OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).

Insert Object
This feature is partially explained above in the 'Paste Special' section.

The Insert Object feature allows you to insert many different types of objects! An object is things like a bitmap image, an Excel chart or worksheet, a Word document, a wave sound even another WordPad document.

Other useful features include.

Word wrap.
WordPad's Word Wrap is more sophisticated than Notepads.

WordPad's Word Wrap allows you to set the word wrap to never wrap, this allows your text to be entered for a very long time on a single line. Wrap to ruler, this will wrap the text at the point where your ruler is set.

The ruler is shown below.

The final Word wrap feature allows you to 'wrap to window'. This simply wraps the text around when it reaches the right hand side or the right hand margin of your document.

Notepad Vs WordPad

So in summing up, I think both Notepad and WordPad are useful tools. Notepad is great for quick notes that don't require any special features and WordPad is great for creating documents that need more sprucing up than can be offered by Notepad.

WordPad also lets you insert images into your document as well as link to data contained in other documents and files.

Wordpad is not as powerful, or feature packed as Word, but it is free and is more than capable of creating good quality presentable documents.

I suggest you give Wordpad a go before you splash out and purchase a copy of Word or any other word processor, you may find it satisfies your requirements.

Time to Type - A Quick Introduction to Notepad and Wordpad.
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Article © Matt Western - deTechnify.com

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Matt Western has been working in the electronics and IT areas since 1983. These days he heads up deTechnify.com a web site aimed at clearing away the technical haze surrounding computers computing and the internet.
You can contact Matt via http://www.detechnify.com