Publisher alternative in 2026

This has made me panic - I run a small business for greeting cards and have 1000's of files. Publisher is a great middle ground application that is perfect for what I need to do without being too complicated. I'm reading that many use it for newsletters, classrooms and voluntary organisation publications and feel to remove it will force people to abort or pay expensive subscriptions. Please reconsider Microsoft.

I hate that you are retiring Microsoft Publisher. I use it to create most of my Etsy products. It is easy to navigate and simple to use. Plus, I will have to move hundreds of templates. Maybe rethink what you are doing?

As far as I can see, there is only 1 decent alternative: LibreOffice Draw.

It has the best compatibility with your older *.PUB files.

When Microsoft let us down, I guess it will be go to alternative.

> check it out four your self. It is in the LibreOffice suit (you can not download it individually, but you can create a desktop shortcut toe LibreOffice Draw).

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/

Greetings

Jef

Word will not open, update, or use Publisher files (*.pub).

Some "desktop publishing" programs, e.g., Libre Office Draw and Affinity Publisher 2, allow you to open Publisher files. From what I've read, Publisher files may not transfer perfectly into these applications, but will be "close enough."

Publisher has been a wonderful program for me. It is used for my card and art company of 12 years. Two 2 computers are owned and a 3rd just purchased which has not been used. All have MS365 on them. I'm trying to find/get a definite answer to the same question as well, but from what was read a while back, we will not be able to use Publisher (including if someone owns a stand alone version) or even to open up our files. We might be able to access a PDF of the file. Unfortunately that doesn't help. At this point I believe all of the previously completed jobs and files will have to recreated in another program. I hope I am wrong!!