Microsoft’s Notepad underwent many changes to stay relevant in Windows 11. But despite being a text editor, it lacked a basic functionality—spell check. Microsoft Word has had a spellcheck feature for years, but not the trusty old Notepad. After feedback, Microsoft has finally released an update for Notepad that includes a spell-check feature.

Windows 11 testers in the Canary and Dev channel will receive an update via the Microsoft Store for Notepad version 11.2402.18.0. After installing the update, the spellcheck feature will become available.

You don’t need to configure anything in the app settings to enable the spellcheck feature. It is active by default and will highlight all your writing mistakes in real time. Moreover, it also adds an autocorrect feature to fix spelling mistakes.

All other trivial features, such as spelling suggestions for a mistake, are also available. You can press the Shift + F10 shortcut to open suggestions for a mistyped word or hover the cursor on the word.

You can also add incorrectly flagged words to the dictionary. Microsoft highlighted in its blog post that spell check supports multiple languages.

By default, the spell check feature works with text files and is turned off for coding-related files and log files. If you want to enable spell check in these files (to find errors in the comments section of the code or other text snippets), you can do so using Notepad settings.

Remember that the feature is still rolling out, and you may get it late. Notepad recently got the Explain with Copilot feature in the preview channels. Microsoft is also testing a Cocreartor feature to assist you in writing.

Cocreator can be your personal writing assistant

Microsoft has already added the Cocreator feature in the Paint app, which produces AI-generated images from user prompts and works on a credit system. The Cocreator feature in Notepad will work similarly, helping you generate text based on the prompts.

Windows Latest spotted some new files in the Notepad app package. It indicates that an AI assistant feature is indeed in the works.

After you exhaust the daily credits, the Cocreator feature will still work. However, text generation would become way slower.

Microsoft continues experimenting with infusing AI capabilities in Notepad, such as summarizing a chunk of text. However, when Copilot is just a click away, this can seem a bit redundant.