Notepad is about to support automatic note summarization using AI

Notepad, one of Windows’ most iconic apps, is known for its simplicity and “old school” feel. You type, the letters appear as plain text, and that’s it. No formatting, no links, no other word processing features—but that old school feel is about to change. Microsoft has begun testing an AI feature for Notepad that will summarize parts of your text documents.

The new feature is part of Notepad version 11.2501.29.0, which is currently rolling out to Windows Insiders—users enrolled in Microsoft's early access program. The way the new feature works is simple: Highlight a piece of text, right-click, and select Summarize . Alternatively, you can press Ctrl + M on your keyboard. This will bring up an AI-generated summary, and you can adjust the length of the summary to suit your needs.

If you want to avoid using this feature, you can turn it off in the app's settings menu. However, like other AI features on Windows 11, you need to sign in with a personal Microsoft account to use the summary tool.

This is essentially a modernized addition to the Rewrite feature set that was announced for Notepad last year, where a sentence or paragraph of text can be edited to change its length, tone, or formatting. With Summarize and Rewrite, users can easily tweak written text files to make them more detailed or shorter as needed, and tailor the output to match the tone or style they're aiming for.

In addition to Summarize, this update to Notepad also includes the addition of a Recent Files option to the File menu, making it quicker and easier to open recently used or closed documents, allowing you to pick up where you left off. Notepad is getting more modern and useful.