When you have a computer of speed 166 mhz and ram of 16 mb you need to conserve the memory so when you need to type a quick professional note or letter Word Pad is your only option. With its sister program the world class Microsoft Word it takes time and memory to open and run. Obviously Word is much better and much more professional then Word Pad and if you were typing a formal letter or project Word is your only option in that case.

Word Pad can be found on Windows at start then programs then accessories and then at the bottom of the accessories drop down bar you will find Word Pad it comes at standard to Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT and Windows ME (thanks bonky) i'm not sure for Windows 2000 (maybe someone could leave a comment saying whether or not it does and I will but it in).

Now I will give all the features of Word Pad by category:

In the file category:
You can open a new document, open an old document, save your current document. You can print the document or take a print preview of it before hand. You can change the margins, page size etc. in the page setup menu. When you click send Outlook Express opens a new message with the current document attached. And then at the bottom you can exit the current document.

In the edit category:
You can undo what you just did. You can cut, copy, paste. You can delete something or you can highlight the whole document by clicking select all. You can find a word in the document and you can insert objects.

In the view category:
You can change the top of the screen to show:

Toolbar: This contains new, open, save, print, print preview, find, cut, copy, paste, undo and a handy button that inserts the date and time.

Format bar: This contains all the different fonts and font sizes. It lets you bold, italic, underline and change the colour of the highlighted section. You can insert bullet points. And you can align the font left, centre and right.

In this view category you can also insert the ruler bar and the status bar.

In the insert category:
You can insert the current time and date. You can also insert different documents.

In the format category:
You can change the current font, bullet size, paragraph and tabs. I don't recommend going into this when you could just use the format bar and have all the shortcuts right in front of you.

In the help bar:
You can find all the possible things that could go wrong. They are all indexed accordingly. There is also an about Word Pad menu.

Overall this is a very important application for me and without i'm sure I would be late all the time waiting for Word to load but with Word Pad it just takes seconds to load, the seconds to type and the learning curve is 10 to 60 minutes. With Word this is considerbly longer.



Recommended: Yes