In October 2026, Microsoft Publisher will reach its end of life. After that time, it will no longer be included in Microsoft 365 and existing on-premises suites will no longer be supported. Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher. Until then, support for Publisher will continue and users can expect the same experience as today.
↫ Microsoft’s Support website
Microsoft Publisher is an application with a long history, and it’s been part of Microsoft Office for almost 35 years. The initial 1.0 version was released all the way back in 1991, and it’s tried to compete with tools like InDesign and QuarkXPress in the desktop publishing market, but it never gained much of a share. Microsoft advises users of Publisher to use a combination of Word, PowerPoint, or Designer instead, which, of course, are all Microsoft products too.
Due to Microsoft’s stupidly complex naming schemes and branding changes over the years, you might assume that the quoted paragraph means Publisher will just stop working for everyone, but that’s not the case. People who have the regular, non-subscription version of Publisher, probably as part of Microsoft Office, will of course be able to keep using it perpetually, just without support. If you use Office through Microsoft 365, however, the application will just… Stop working.
Welcome to the future, I guess.
I’m curious, though – do any of you use Microsoft Publisher, at home or at your work? I assumed the entire desktop publishing market was locked up by things like InDesign and QuarkXPress, and I had almost forgotten Publisher was still a thing in the first place.
Well tried to use Publisher once way back in time and once was enough.
Have used InDesign (and Pagemaker further back).
[managed to use Fleet Street Editor commercially back in the 8-bit days but that was a bit nasty, if you are familiar then moved on to Impression Publisher for many years which was somewhat more pleasant]
InDesign is the most fully featured and capable package but it does cost a bit (although can do monthly subscription and un-subscribe when no longer needing it) – do worry about future file access though.
The last few years have been using Scribus. It is not as fully featured but managed to generate 2 fairly complex full colour guideline documents each in the order of 100A4 pages (double sided) published as PDFs with internal hotlinks etc for commercial clients last year.
The good thing about Scribus is that it is free, open source, cross-platform and you don’t have to worry about future access to files so long as keep a copy of the program. And it is still being actively developed – latest stable release 1.6.3 – 8th Jan 2025.
I used Publisher once, years ago, and wasn’t impressed. I assumed it was supposed to fill a sort of “beginner” niche that Word was probably already doing.
My school had Fleet Street Editor and it was quite horrible. When they bought a handful of RM Nimbuses (Nimbi?) they also bought Aldus Pagemaker, which was a lot better. At home, I eventually bought Ovation Pro, which was not bad for being written by one person, David Pilling.
I’m using open source Scribus. It’s well-featured (though a little bit complex to use compared to other ones, fortunately there are youtube tutorials) and I’ve authored quite a few nice-looking brochures with it. In a pinch, you can even do basic DTP with LibreOffice Writer. But I prefer Scribus.
Frankly I’m surprised Publisher was around for so long, last time I heard about anyone using it for anything was in 2016 and even then it was in context of replacing it with another DTP program.
I don’t understand why they’re just killing it. Just keep it available without any further updates? Just some patches if there happens to be a security issue? Or make the last version available as a free or paid stand-alone product that’s independent of M365?
Selling the product Microsoft to meet SLA requirements has to provide security updates. The without any further updates basically does not work out commercially.
Now just security updates not to break the world means you have to have 90% of the staff that you need for adding new features. Every quality security update need the same testing as what you do after any code change and you need people understanding the code base to see if change is going to break anything..
Only way to release without needing team of developers is basically release the software free as basically legal abandon-ware then you can stick as is where is on it and resolve you self as a company from the security risks. This also means the software will be blacked listed being used by most major companies due to being unsupported. Of course doing this risks having this abandon-ware competing with your existing products in the home market.
So the result is if commercial software is not bringing in enough money to cover the development team and you have competing products even just slightly is kill the product completely. Like you could say that MS Word slightly competed with MS Publisher.
The best option like it not is kill the complete product for Microsoft. Please note its not just Microsoft who does this. Killing the product completely is a lot simpler with likes of online games and software that need to connect to online servers to work..
I used to use it quite a bit at previous jobs, but that’s been a very long time ago. Over ten years, as a matter of fact.
This does mean the publisher format now comes a non moving target. Libreoffice Draw does have a Publisher importer that can be improved. Yes another format that you will be going though business archives that will come reach for Libreoffice not to mess around with VM and other things..
LibreOffice already imports MS Publisher files. So does Scribus.
Scribus sorry there was a prototype of a import MS Publisher that was latter removed. Libreoffice is the maintained and extended one.
I wasn’t surprised when I saw that some people I worked with used PowerPoint instead of Publisher for some publications.
I had a lot of fun with Publisher 1.0 as a kid and will miss it, but…it seemed like a product designed to produce sheets of paper, and we’re in a post-paper world.
We are very far from being in a post-paper world.
That said, desktop publishing apps get used to produce PDF documents mostly these days. Some of those go to print. Some don’t.
There are many MS Publisher alternatives, including Open Source ones.