- The windows 11 Notepad app offers new testing features
- The application now supports creating tables quickly and easily.
- Additionally, additional AI capabilities are available in the form of on-the-fly previews for creating and rewriting text.
Microsoft is once again beefing up Notepad in Windows 11, giving the increasingly lightweight editor new features in spreadsheet support and greater AI capabilities.
This can be seen in the new Notepad preview available to Windows 11 testers in the Canary and Dev channels. Microsoft explains in a blog post.
The big step is that tables have come to Notes and the ability to create these tables has been added to the formatting toolbar.
They work as expected and allow you to quickly insert a table into a document by selecting the format using a visual grid interface. As Microsoft notes, right-clicking on a table provides quick editing options to add or remove rows or columns.
From an AI perspective, what’s new here is “result streaming” for the Write, Rewrite, and Summarize functions, which do what they’re supposed to do (create new text, rewrite existing text, or summarize something).
‘Approved results’ means that the text written (or rewritten) by the AI is immediately displayed in a preview window, so you can start reviewing (or editing) faster.
Analysis: Bloat and performance issues
This is certainly a useful note for those who take advantage of the AI features now offered in Notepad, although there is one small problem: streaming results for Rewrite is only possible on a copilot+ PC, at least for now (using the NPU for local processing on the device). You must also sign in to a Microsoft account to use these AI features in Notes.
Tables can also be useful for some people, and the way they are implemented with this grid interface is very similar to how they work in Microsoft Word.
But adding more features to Notepad is sure to annoy those who simply want this editor to be completely minimalist so that it remains elegant and runs (and loads) as responsive as possible. As I personally use Word, I would like to leave Notepad as a truly lightweight alternative, the original design concept, although I realize this is obviously not true for everyone.
Still, there’s no shortage of people complaining that Notepad is in danger of being bloated (or, as has become clear in the past, much of it already is), but it seems Microsoft hasn’t added new features yet.
After launching WordPad, which was halfway between Notepad and the full Word experience, in 2024, it seems that Microsoft is making Notepad more and more like its now defunct sibling.