Competing software
Notepad does not require a lock on the file it opens, so it can open files already opened by other processes, users, or computers, whereas WordPad cannot. Also, since Notepad lacks advanced formatting functionality, many people find its simple, minimalistic user interface (whose look has never changed since Windows 3.1 and whose menus were last altered in Windows XP, when "Format" and "View" replaced "Search") faster and easier to use for basic text operations. The MS-DOS Editor, especially as updated in Windows 95, where it became an MDI application, also provides many features never offered by Notepad.
There are many third-party replacements for Notepad with additional functionality, including both free software (e.g. Notepad++ and Notepad2) and freeware (e.g. TED Notepad).
Notepad lacks many features available in other text editors, basic features such as Unix-format newlines, block-select, and MDI, and it lacks full support for line wrapping.
Notepad being a basic text editor, advanced features are also missing: syntax coloring, code folding, regular expressions, macros, support of codepages and color schemes.