Publisher alternative in 2026

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'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 only found out about this today! I am appalled. Like many others here I have been using Publisher for many, many years - lost count.

Before Office became cloud-based, Publisher was a standalone piece of software. All Microsoft needs to do is to offer Publisher as a standalone which we can download to our computers. I'm not interested in it being updated - most of the new things in Microsoft 365 are of no interest to me - it seems like changes are made for the sake of changes rather than being any use. If Word did what Publisher can do then we would all have been using it before this. The biggest bugbear (and mentioned already) is that you can only place photos where Word wants them placed. That's not DTP.

I doubt that Microsoft will listen to us. It would be great if they did.

I mainly want to know if I can download the application to my hard drive and continue using it sans updates/modifications to the program. I can convert my files to PDF at present.

The features I use, especially moving text and picture/illustrations around, dropping in guidelines to align photos and text, resizing, etc. are unwieldy, not available or useful in the either Word or PowerPoint and I don't use other applications for creating flyers and brochures. I had access to Canva through my school district during COVID and Zoom teaching, but didn't use it as I prefer Publisher. I created a poster for my class reunion and used Publisher to make my sample with proportional measurements for printing and to guide me for cut and paste on the poster board and to send the publisher file or save to PDF to other classmates and for mailers. I am not happy with the decision to drop and not support MS Publisher. Please bring it back!

If you don't, is there a version I can download to my hard drive? I also looked through my old programs and disks, found my MS Office Professional Edition 2003, but the CD for is only the UPGRADE version. I'm not even sure if I found my older full version it would load on my Windows 10 and be able to upgrade with the 2003 disk.