Windows Notepad Grew Up: Tabs, Markdown and an AI Switch
Session restore, formatting, spell check and AI writing tools are all new in Notepad, and every one of them has a switch.
You open Notepad to jot down a phone number. A tab bar greets you, a row of formatting buttons, a little pen icon in the corner, and last week's shopping list is still there even though you never saved it. Notepad has changed more in the last few years than in the decades before. Spell check only arrived in 2024. Now it does Markdown, tables and AI rewriting too.
That is great news if you know where the switches are, and mildly annoying if you don't. This guide covers the Microsoft Store version of Notepad on Windows 11 (11.2607.14.0 at the time of writing) and shows you how to use the new tricks, and how to turn off the ones you don't want.
Step 1: Work in tabs
Notepad opens every document in a tab, much like a browser. Click the + next to the last tab for a fresh page, click a tab to switch, and click the x on a tab to close it. Ten scraps of text no longer mean ten windows on your taskbar.
All app settings sit behind the gear icon in the top-right corner. You will need it for most of the steps below.
Step 2: Decide what happens when Notepad starts
By default, Notepad saves your session. Close the app with three unsaved tabs, open it tomorrow, and all three are back, text and all. Handy for quick notes. Less handy if you share the PC or paste sensitive things like passwords or tokens into a "temporary" tab.
- Click the gear icon to open Settings.
- Expand When Notepad starts.
- Pick Continue previous session to keep the restore behavior, or Start new session and discard unsaved changes for a clean slate every time.
Treat restored tabs like sticky notes on your monitor: convenient, but anybody who sits down can read them. If something matters, save it as a file with Ctrl+S.
Step 3: Format text and use Markdown
The second row of the window now has a small formatting toolbar: a heading picker, list buttons, bold, italic and a link button. Select text and click, or set a style first and keep typing. Recent versions added tables (insert one from the toolbar, then add or remove rows and columns with a right-click), strikethrough and nested lists.
Formatting toolbar at the top, Markdown view toggle in the status bar.
Under the hood this is Markdown. If you prefer to see the raw syntax (the asterisks, hashes and brackets), switch views through the View menu or the toggle in the status bar at the bottom, which reads Formatted in the formatted view. You can also type Markdown directly and let Notepad render it.
To strip formatting from a document, use the clear option in the formatting toolbar or the Edit menu. Want the old plain-text Notepad back for good? Open Settings and switch off Formatting. Notepad asks you to confirm, and from then on it behaves like the classic editor.
Step 4: Let spell check catch typos
Misspelled words get a red wavy underline. Click the word, or move the cursor onto it and press Shift+F10, to see suggestions. Pick one and Notepad replaces the word at once. You can also ignore the word in the current document or add it to your dictionary so it stops being flagged.
Click a flagged word for a list of corrections.
Spell check is smart about file types. It is off by default for log files and the formats people usually use for code, so your config files don't drown in red lines. To change it, open Settings, go to Spelling and use the Spell check and Autocorrect toggles. You can also adjust which file types get checked there.
Step 5: Try the AI writing tools
Notepad has three AI features: Write drafts new text from a prompt, Rewrite reworks a selection (shorter, longer, a different tone or format), and Summarize condenses a long selection to a short, medium or long summary. In current versions they sit behind the pen icon on the right of the toolbar, labelled Writing tools.
- Select the text you want to work on (for Write, just place the cursor).
- Press Ctrl+D for Rewrite, Ctrl+M for Summarize or Ctrl+Q for Write. Right-clicking the selection works too.
- Browse the suggestions, then click Replace, insert the summary, or choose Keep Text for a draft from Write.
Rewrite shows several versions you can flip through before replacing your text.
A few things to know before you rely on it. You need to sign in with a Microsoft account. Cloud-based features use AI credits: Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers get a monthly allowance, Copilot Pro subscribers get more. On Copilot+ PCs some results come from a local model on the device instead. Cloud requests send the selected text to an online Azure service for processing, so think twice before you summarize anything confidential.
Step 6: Switch the AI features off
Don't want any of it? Notepad has a switch.
- Open Settings with the gear icon.
- Scroll down to Advanced features.
- Turn off Writing tools.
Older builds put this under a section called AI features with a toggle named Copilot. If your Notepad still shows those labels, it simply hasn't received the 2026 update yet. Either way, one toggle is all it takes.
Our verdict
The new Notepad suits anyone who writes quick notes, to-do lists or simple README files and doesn't want to open a word processor. Formatting and spell check are real upgrades. Session restore and AI are useful, but they deserve a deliberate choice rather than the defaults. Do one thing today: open Notepad's settings and decide whether last week's unsaved tabs should really come back tomorrow.
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