We mentioned a couple years back that Microsoft Publisher – the little desktop publishing application that could – will be being discontinued in October of 2026. October 2026 is nearly here so if you still use Publisher or have Publisher files sitting around that you will need access to, you need to plan accordingly.
First off, you’ll want to see if you actually have any Publisher files sitting around. Whether you are looking in your local computer or on a shared drive like SharePoint, search for “*.pub”. pub is the file extension for Publisher files and this will allow you find all the Publisher files you have created (it’s been around for over 35 years so you could have some old ones if you’ve used it for quite a while). If you haven’t opened or saved any of those files for quite a while, you may not need to worry about this. But that’s the starting point is seeing what you have.
Publisher comes with many Microsoft 365 Subscriptions, but will not able to be installed after October it wasn’t already installed (and may stop functioning entirely, according to some sources).
If you have a one-time purchase license of Office 2016, 2019, or 2021 that includes Publisher, those will continue to work. Stand-alone perpetual licenses like this will always continue to work, but you use them at your own risk as they don’t receive security patches or updates. If you manage to track down a legitimate license for Office 2021 and want to install just Publisher, there are ways to go about that.
Unfortunately as it stands right now, there isn’t a great conversion option for files you want to edit. Microsoft Word does not have the ability at this time to open Publisher files. In theory, LibreOffice and Scribus will open them, but we haven’t tested that. The best recommendation at this point (and before October) would be to open up those files in Publisher that needed to be kept, open them up one-by-one, and save them to both a Word document as well as a PDF (Publisher can export to both of them). There are also PowerShell ways to bulk convert to PDF. Microsoft Word can open and edit PDFs and that’s the best way to keep the layout in-tact. But if you just need the text, saving as a Word document from within Publisher is the best way at this time.
So what are your alternatives going forward? Bouncing around, Adobe InDesign, Scribus, Affinity Publisher, Canva, LibreOffice Draw, and even Microsoft Word and PowerPoint could all be a valid replacement, depending on how you used Publisher.
Regardless of what you decide, if your workflows rely on Publisher, you need to get to work before things stop functioning.