Why is Publisher being phased out, and what is Microsoft replacing it with? Will Microsoft 365 be cheaper since they are phasing out the program?

I volunteer with a non-profit adult literacy ministry. We work around the world developing adult literacy materials in over 280 languages. We train leaders and teachers. We have used Publisher to input some of the literacy materials. It is not perfect but it is much better to use than MS Word, because we use a lot of graphics, tables, text boxes inside graphic boxes, so on, in our literacy materials to teach phonetics. Our methodology of teaching is easy to use for the teacher and the student. Millions of people in many countries have learned to read using our materials.

It will be almost impossible to use our methodology in MS Word with our new Pictorial Teaching Guide, which uses columns containing graphic boxes, text boxes, text and illustrations to show the teacher how to teach the lessons. This was easy to accomplish in Publisher.

We also use Publisher so that the people in many different countries, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, can afford the software to do the desktop publishing of the literacy materials.

Of course they can use MS Word but it is much more difficult to use. We can use Power Point to input our Pictorial Teaching Guide, then we would have to print to pdf, export as jpegs, then insert into Microsoft Word. This would mean a lot of extra training for the people overseas as we train them to do the desktop publishing of their own literacy materials.

I understand that Microsoft does not want to continue updating and doing support on Publisher. But it is such an easy program to use, quite excellent in many ways. Please reconsider phasing Publisher out.

Patricia Hickman

I too use Microsoft Publisher. I have attempted to insert our club newsletter in Microsoft Word and it is not going well. I like sliding text boxes off to the side and not able to do that with Word. I attempt to move charts and it does not go well! Very frustrating to work on the newsletter in Word. I am very upset with Microsoft dropping Publisher.

I was told that Microsoft does not monitor this community bulletin board. You can send feedback to Microsoft using the feedback portal at https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/. I am not sure if there is a specific category for Publisher. If there isn't, you can use the Word category. Share this information. Maybe if Microsoft hears from enough of us, they will do better than just advising us to save all our publisher files to pdf and actually improve the functionality of Word. Or better yet keep Publisher.

Me too.

MS is only looking at the bottom line and, I think, may regret the decision. Word and/or PowerPoint are very different than Publisher and I use all three reasonably often. Even if MS doesn't care to update the software maybe just leave it alone and don't provide support. Or maybe sell the rights and the code to another company who might pick it up and improve it as needed. Should this happen, I may give 365 and other MS products a second thought and consider moving away from MS altogether. My attitude is that if MS doesn't want my business, then I'll find an alternative but probably not consider MS a good company to deal with anymore. Maybe the company has become too big and successful to care about individuals who either have a small business, non-profit groups who work on a shoestring or retired people. They only consider the corporate companies who might not use Publisher all that much. The change is sad for those of us in the catagory above. I've used MS and been a loyal customer for a very long time, going all the way back to MSDOS when Windows and other software MS introduced were only a dream. I advise that MS should give this all a second look and second thought before we all migrate to other products.