Is Microsoft Publisher Being Phased Out?

Our company uses Publisher exclusively for anything that needs more "desktop publishing" oomph than Microsoft Word can handle. We have thousands of files we'll have to convert because we've used Publisher since version 2.0.

Additionally, every Catholic church in the USA uses Microsoft Publisher to produce their Sunday bulletin. This is because it is the required format by the companies that print Sunday Bulletins. This means there are thousands of parishes and several Sunday Bulletin companies who rely on the software to do business.

I haven't informed my users because I'm waiting to see how Microsoft enhances the other applications to take Publisher's place. I will inform everyone in January of 2025 which will give them 24 months to convert their files. I hope by then I have more information than "Microsoft promises to enhanced their products to take Publisher's place." I can tell you that they are also dumping the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. The "new" Outlook is super dumbed down but every week I get an digest of all of the updates Microsoft is making to all of their software and there is something weekly about this or that being added back into New Outlook. (In case you don't know they have decimated the tasks component of the desktop app in favor of "to do" which is so lack luster it breaks my heart.) So, hopefully they will give the Publisher retirement the same attention.

The desktop version of Outlook is being retired in 2027. They delayed it because there was such an outcry about all of the features missing. Maybe we should be giving Microsoft a concise list of what Publisher features need to be added to their other products. I have converted my publisher files for the purposes of pushing Microsoft Word. Not being able to link text boxes will be an issue for some of my users. I would say it is number one in the list of features I need.

Hello, BrianTak.

You've probably read the Microsoft Answers announcement of end of life for Publisher as of October 2026 by now. I like your post with screen shots and explanations. Your theory about the direction of events that drove Microsoft's strategy with MS Publisher reminds me a bit of the "security by obscurity" expression. Quoting,

... I suspect that the primary reason that so few people are using Publisher is that most people who install Office 365 on Windows don't realise Publisher is included. I only know of the existence of Publisher because I used it in the pre-365 era as part of an office suite I purchased...

<snip>

... [although] Microsoft may be continuing to support it, they are hiding its existence so well that in future they'll be able to justify retiring it because "almost nobody is using it".

The causality that Diane Poremsky explained in her two answers seems more plausible: Millions of copies of MS Publisher were bundled and shipped with Office 2021 and its predecessors, but usage waned along with desktop publishing. If Publisher were highly popular, Microsoft would be happy to update and support it! There's no need to "hide" software in order to "make it so unpopular" that its retirement can be justified. Doing so would mean that Microsoft was being duplicitous to itself (employees and stockholders) not customers.

Sorry for belaboring this, but now might be my last chance to tell an MS Publisher story. It's about an acquaintance at the Federal Reserve in Washington D.C. He was there briefly during the mid-2010s, as a high level admin. (I don't work for the Fed but maybe... one day). One weekend, my fortunate friend told me his understanding of "security by obscurity". He used MS Publisher for everything for which his co-workers (and most people, at the Fed or any other organization) would use MS Word.

Why Publisher? For the following terrible reasons:

First, it helped him silo and hoard information, That's because no one else in his group knew Office included Publisher. Better yet, from his point of view, was that only he was familiar with the *.pub file format extension. So, he did his work using an application that no one else knew AND he confidently saved his files on the shared drive without worrying that anyone could access them.

He got fired after less than 6 months. He was caught using MS Word for only what he wanted to share, while lying about his *.pub file trove of information he revealed for his own advantage.