Microsoft Publisher Books Its Retirement Party for 2026 - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  I know for certain, the second that the publisher application is retired, someone is going to send me a.pub file to print.

  • LibreOffice Draw.

    In general, LibreOffice has more support for abandoned MS Office document formats than MS Office does.

    Some people love to pay subscription fees, though.

    • Re:

      Subscription fees gives the assurance that if there's a problem that the good hearted folks at microsoft will help them out. Reality is that microsoft will tell them to screw off. Microsoft Support department exists mostly to provide a fiction that support exists.

  • Re:

    "someone is going to send me a.pub file to print."

    Well you probably just want to view it rather than print it.
    (typically it will be the monthly company newsletter)
    So what will O365 do with the file when you try to open it after that date?

• I still use Publisher 2010 for making greeting cards; it seems great for this. Other applications, like Scribus or LibreOffice Draw, seem like overkill.

  I've resigned myself to having to using, probably, Draw, going forward as I'll be using my Linux Mint system full-time when Windows 10 hits EOL, as my current Windows PC is too old to (officially) support Windows 11 (and I don't think I'd like it over Windows 10 anyway). I've already migrated all my misc spreadsheets from Excel, and my (long-time) budge

  • Re:

    Yes, I remember greeting cards, those pieces of heavy paper with cute sayings that we all used to send each other! Nowadays, the only "greeting cards" I get are junk mail from people who want to sell something.

    It's probably not coincidental that Publisher is going away, it is good at things people *used* to do.

    • Re:

      They still do those things; Canva is the most recent company to build an empire on the same shit. The only difference is that Publisher prints it out and Canva spits it directly into the social media firehose. Well, I guess the other difference is that Publisher isnt a shitty web app. So long, Publisher, and thanks for all the brochures.

  • EOL doesn't mean unusable in a VM

    It's trivial to have any version of Windows at hand in virtual machines on Linux (and sample other distros too).

    You might try Publisher in Wine etc too.

    If you have the space I make VMs based on old OS installs (Windows and Linux) so I can have the entire identical running install at hand for convenience. External drives will do.

• Scribus is a free desktop publishing program.

  It's a bit intimidating when you first load it, but the basics aren't difficult to grasp after a bit of playing around.

  I use it to create ads and coupons for my business.

  A friend of mine uses it to do the layout for his weekly newspaper, as well as things like flyers and business cards for his commercial printing operation.

  • Re: Scribus

    Scribus is perfect for replacing publisher because both are pathetic.

    Try doing a Scribus document with more than a handful of pages and you will quickly find that Pacemaker on a Macintosh from the fucking eighties is more useful than current Scribus on a modern system.

    Scribus is suitable for greeting cards, though.

• Publisher actually isn't a terrible page layout program. Sure, the earlier editions were pretty janky, but it really shaped up after 2007...and while the QuarkXpress and InDesign die hards still scoff at it, they're not the target demographic. The target demographic were office folks who needed something more than MS Word for flyers and other simple page layout tasks, but weren't going to learn the nuts and bolts of Quark or InDesign to make those things.

  Infuriatingly, Publisher was only available as a standalone product, or as part of the Professional versions of Office; it wasn't included in the 'home' or 'standard' versions...and the folks who had the budget for Office Professional tended to have the budget for InDesign, too. Sure, MS bundled it with the subscription versions of Office, but that's after a decade of playing games with the availability. By then, there were alternatives.

  Ultimately though, I think the reason Publisher is being retired isn't because of the application, it's the templates. To avoid everyone having same-y layouts, the design templates need to be rotated in, and doing so takes artistic development time. Meanwhile, Canva is the new darling product for the niche Publisher had, and Affinity Publisher is both inexpensive and perpetually licensed, making it a viable option, too. With there being less of a need for paper flyers by virtue of e-mail and social media, even Constant Contact ate into the Publisher install base.

  Like most things, I'm sure it's still got its loyalists and its niche users, but I'm reasonably confident that 98% of the use cases for Publisher are adequately covered either by InDesign, Affinity, Canva, or Constant Contact. My only hope is that MS makes some sort of converter for.pub and.pubx files to be open in something else.

  • Re:

    Haha. A while ago I needed to upgrade an old Outlook Express 6 mail machine to Live Mail 2012, and I couldn't because the OE6 mailbox format is too old and unsupported. The solution was to do a stopgap upgrade to Live Mail 2009 and then to 2012. Microsoft had deleted every trace of Live Mail 2009 from their web site, so I ended up having to pirate a free application just to perform an update to a totally different version.

    Companies today are all too happy to leave you in a lurch.

• That's like saying the hammer is responsible for a badly made table.

  • 1 hidden comment

  • • Re: A poor workman ...

      If the hammer has an uneven face, it will be responsible for dings in the wood, even though it's *possible,* (but difficult), to make a great table with it.

• Time to look at Affinity Publisher, if places have not done so already. This is the easiest way to wean people from Publisher. LibreOffice Draw is another solid way, but Affinity does an excellent job of having application quality.

  To boot, you purchase outright... no subscriptions needed with Affinity.

• You could use Publisher to do some pretty good work, but most people authoring books and not just making basic internal communications are likely using Adobe InDesign, which is descended from PageMaker.

  I've used all of the above over the years and since I have an Adobe Cloud subscription (the only software 'subscription' I am willing to have) InDesign is my go-to for that sort of thing these days.

• "Though it lacked many of the features of its competitors, it... was popular due to its cheap price."

• The first version of office I installed was before Office95. I certainly didn't install all of them (and haven't installed one in some time now) but I don't remember seeing Publisher listed. I also don't remember ever seeing someone send out a file from it.
  
  This might be - at least in part - due to having seen Quark XPress at my work starting in 2000. Nobody wanted to use anything else for layout there. My wife has used by Quark and Adobe InDesign for a couple decades now, and I doubt she ever heard

• Iff so, it'll be 2027, 2023, next week, 2080, 3047, 1975, 7211, 2029, etc....