Wordpad - what's the point, what's the use?

Wordpad.exe on my Win7 64-bit is about 4.4MB, not KB. The write.exe file is 10KB but only calls wordpad.exe.

Compare Notepad to Wordpad and you'll see allot more options, As far as website formatting Notepad will strip any of that out

Yep, Notepad is what some call a pure text editor, has no hidden formatting. Writing Web pages in Notepad used to be popular once HTML was learned then good graphical programs came about which made it much easier. Always liked FrontPage [part of Microsoft Office] until I had to move on for the needs of the company hosting my Domain, now use Microsoft Expression Web and there's a number of others.

Having WordPad on the computer gets the new user learning and doing right away, finding out there may be more features they could use. In that light it's a plus for both the consumer and Microsoft.

Same here, I may start out in Notepad, but usually want some formatting before too long. Notepad++ is a nice text editor if you ever need more than what Notepad does. I use it for quick HTML edits or other source code-type files, like INI. It has line numbers which helps a lot.

Couple years ago, my work laid off a bunch of people, not many of us left to do the work. I hear my boss yelling, loud and angry. Went into his office, he was on the verge of a stroke. Turns out he had to write a proposal himself, and was using Word. I explained that this was his baptism, we've all been through it whilei getting to a point to where we finally learned Word well enough to do something with it. Anyone who sat down with it without any training all went through some level of that frustration. Mine was something like inserting clip art and formatting to wrap the text. Then I just wanted to move it down maybe just one line - and it ended up either three pages before or after the page I put it on. And this was working as designed.

I just tell folks that don't have/can't afford Microsoft Office to use the built-in Wordpad, it's a 'lite' version of Word and usually can work with .doc files. Microsoft Works was the worst for compatibility which led to upgrading to Works Suite which had Word replacing the word processor portion. LibreOffice does quite well handling a number of Office documents but as is the usual caveat, nothing totally beats the original. Personally, I haven't found a reason to switch totally to Word, got started with WordPerfect and it still does what I need, some things are just plain easier to do.

I keep a log file as I work on residential computers, and Wordpad is the best since it loads as fast as notepad, but also allows formatting & even bmps if needed.