Publisher alternative in 2026

The clear advice I have from softwarebase.uk, which Trustpilot rates highly, is that the only solution to this problem is to cancel my subscription to MS365, uninstall it from my laptop, and install instead Office 21Pro-plus, which gives me Publisher, Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc for eternity for a one-off payment to softwarebase.uk which is a lot less than one month's subscription to MS 365, so I solve the problem and save a small fortune at the same time. By paying a bit more and buying the reinstallable version of Office 21 Pro-Plus I am also in a position in future to shift it to any new computer I buy. It is apparently NOT true that you can load both 365 and Office on the same machine by creating two profiles on it. The only ways to have both on one machine are to have dual boots or to have a Windows virtual machine running within Windows itself. I'm not enough of a geek to attempt either of those.

Thank you. This sounds like a solution. I cannot understand why MS are doing this.

Did you have 365 installed when you installed it? Mine errors immediately when I try to run it don’t get to a point of choosing where to install it.

Yes I did. I created the new folder first and then installed Publisher to that folder. I have just checked to make sure that it is working with 365 files and I can open 365 files, edit, save and PDF in Publisher 2002.

Not sure why you can't select a folder to install to. BTY, I only installed Publisher, not the whole Office suite.

DianeC

David, not sure who told you that you can't load a different version of Publisher on the same machine that is running 365. I HAVE installed 2002 Publisher on the same machine as 365. I installed it to a different sub-folder in the Program folder. It works fine with my 365 Publisher files, ie I can open, edit, save, PDF, etc., 365 Publisher files from Publisher 2002 and vice-versa.

DianeC

Thank you for this. I’ll try it. It would be the best solution for us editors of our local mag.