It has only been three years since Microsoft Word got the Send to Kindle feature, now, however, Microsoft is retiring the feature from today and will fully remove it for everyone by March 9. While you won’t be able to send documents from Word on desktop or web, you will still be able to send documents using Amazon’s Send to Kindle website.
The reason Microsoft has retired the feature is because it wants to focus on core productivity features within Word. This feature was replicating something you could already do with Amazon’s Send to Kindle, so it made sense to retire it and focus energy elsewhere. Additionally, sending Word documents to a Kindle device seems like a niche action, as most people are using their Kindles to read books.
From today, the feature will no longer be available in Word for Windows desktop, Word for Mac desktop, or Word for the web. To be clear, the retirement starts today, but you might not be affected by it until March 9, by which time, nobody will be able to use it. This feature was never available for Word on Android or iOS.
For organizations and administrators, no action is required regarding this phase out. The Redmond giant recommends informing users of the change and updating any internal documentation or workflows that reference the Send to Kindle feature.
Amazon’s Send to Kindle website is really easy to use, just open it in any browser where you are signed into your Amazon account and then just drag and drop the files you want to transfer to your Kindle. Send to Kindle supports the following filetypes: PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, RTF, HTM, HTML, PNG, GIF, JPG, JPEG, BMP, EPUB. Notice that Word’s DOC and DOCX filetypes are supported.