MS Publisher - disappearing Oct 2026

[R6GYY]

Just had an email from Microsoft that Publisher will disappear from MS 365 as of October next year.

Publisher is something I use a lot so now need to find something suitable as a replacement.

LibreOffice Draw is favourite so far.

Initial investigations show that it imports my existing pub docs very nearly perfectly - although any special fonts I have used have been replaced, and images haven't had their transparency setting imported.

Sigh.

There is the option of converting to pdf but I would need to investigate a macro solution for this.

Feckers.

[Slim]

Never used it myself but aren't Microsoft recommending an alternative? I know they're deco-ing Skype in a couple of months, but they suggest using Teams instead.

[R6GYY]

They are suggesting Word or Powerpoint.

I have tried Word in the past but it is not friendly for the kind of thing I want to do.

Also they suggest their AI tool - something called Designer. I already pay a subscription for MS 365 which is very good value I will say, especially if you shop around. I don't wish to pay for AI credits on top to do something which I could do easily in Publisher.

MS argument is that paper publishing is being replace by online digital publishing and I just don't go along with that. There are countless educational establishments and similar that use Publisher to create brochures, newsletters and the like.

Sian uses Publisher as part of her job. I mentioned the impending loss of Publisher and she wasn't impressed. She is a hobby crafter herself and also mentioned that there will be countless crafting people that use Publisher.

I don't see why they can't just keep it, even if they don't update it (which I don't think they have been actively doing for some time anyway).

<sigh>

[pxr5]

Could you not buy one of the last physical copies of Office instead Reg? I still use MS Office 2007 and it's still better than Libreoffice/Openoffice.

[R6GYY]

I probably do have that option available to me if I go digging around in my old disc collection but to be fair, LibreOffice Draw so far has behaved very well. In fact for my needs it may even be slightly easier to use.

Quite happy with it so far, unlike the 1st thing I tried (Scribus) which was awful.