Publisher alternative in 2026

Hi Sophia,

I am hoping to use the new Designer to replace the banners and memes I create with Publisher. Currently, the inability to add new fonts and the presence of vertical text are preventing me from transferring all my creations to Designer. I have used it for other things since it was introduced, and I appreciate how it has evolved so far. There is a learning curve, and things I would like tweaked. I thought I would make you aware of my needs and hope that many features of Publisher can move to Designer. I would like to keep myself in the Microsoft family and not have to use a bunch of random apps or programs.

Thank you!

I would say this is very inaccurate. I have tried several times in preparation for the discontinuations to use the label feature in Word and it is so far away from easy. I have not successfully been able to mail merge and create labels with the design where I need it to be to print on the label sheets. Creating programmes for my school in Word isn't user friendly either.

If you were to offer it separately, I could understand but this puts many teachers, small businesses, and non-profits in a position of scrambling trying to figure out something.

I hope you keep Publisher in some form.

I've used WordPerfect for years for transcription. The companies I work with don't like Word, and neither do I. Just playing around with it briefly I was able to insert a photo and a news article by clicking insert, graphics/pictures, from file, and browsing folders to choose files. The objects were easy to move around. Dragging and pasting did not work.

Thanks, Susan Gordon, for this suggestion.

And can you place photos where you want them on the page, resize them, and then have the text flow around them? If it can do all that, I'm in.

I just tried wordperfect it has a pdf conversion & worked pretty well. Still have to adjust the formatting; however wordperfect has a great feature where you can see the formatting codes, so you work in that area & take out the formatting you don't want.