This morning, I almost chuckled when I saw that Microsoft had finally decided to give its humble text editor, Notepad, spell check and autocorrect features. It’s strange (and shocking) that the app hasn’t offered such basic functionality since its inception in 1983.

Microsoft has been testing the features for a few months now. Like a typical Microsoft release, they were previously demoed exclusively to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels in March of 2024. It began rolling out Windows Insiders in the Beta and Release Preview Channels in May. And in recent days, as spotted by The Verge, the features have started to become available for all Windows 11 users.

I played around with the feature, and it works as expected. Every time you make a spelling mistake or run into a typo, you see a red underline appear under it. To see possible word corrections, click or tap on it. For keyboard shortcut geeks, the shortcut is Shift + F10 when you hover on the underlined word. When you see a suggestion you want to switch to, click on it to update your misspelled word. By right-clicking on the underlined word, you can also choose to ‘Ignore’ it or add it to the dictionary so that it’s not marked as a typo again.

Microsoft has been working on making Notepad more usable. Tabs were introduced earlier this year in the barebones text editor. There is still a long way to go before we provide the functionality of MS Word, but I appreciate the minor, modest updates.