Publisher alternative in 2026

I'm extremely disappointed and annoyed that Publisher will be discontinued. It's user-friendly, easy to learn and flexible, and it's great for producing bulletins, newsletters, and other documents that require creative layouts. MS Word and PowerPoint are NOT suitable alternatives for this kind of work. Microsoft's decision to discontinue this program is short-sighted and is a dis-service to those who use it.

I'm with you, I know we have a while yet but I have been looking at various programs to see if they can easily perform the tasks I currently use Publisher for. I create greeting cards and have many templates set up in Publisher that I can easily open, edit and print. I have not found anything else in office 365 or anywhere else yet that easily allows me to do the same. With Publisher it allows you to create the front and back of the design, others you seem to have to make the whole page the size of the card and then lining up has proved difficult. I have an old standalone copy of office but I am unable to install it alongside my current 365 subscription. I do hope they either change their mind or incorporate the ease of creating cards into something else.

Use another email address to open a new Microsoft account. (If you don't have another email address, get one in gmail.) Then you should be able to install the stand-alone Office.

This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever witnessed... how do you kill a program AND disable folks from opening old files? I have a small business that uses Publisher exclusively to create variable data greeting cards, letters, postcards, etc. I have over 42 THOUSAND files, in over 3420 folders that will all have to be RECREATED. Why can't you just disable the support and let us keep our old Publisher? My files are primarily used for mail merge, and instead of creating a bunch of different PDFs (because we could be creating pieces from up to 45 different companies every day, all having different templates, logos, owner pics, etc.), I merge and ADD new pages to an existing document of the same type for each customer, so that I can print ALL the same type of files together. You CAN'T do that with Word... it's not an option. This is so crazy and mind boggling. Praying Microsoft hears all of these complaints and gets their head out of their rear ends to do an about face on this.

I hope they do too.