Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

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StuartR
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Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

Post by StuartR »

My current installation of Office 365 includes Microsoft Publisher 365.

When I look on the Microsoft web site I cannot see any Office 365 packages that include publisher. Is it likely that a future Office update will remove Publisher with no warning?
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HansV
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

Post by HansV »

Yes, Publisher will be removed - see Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026
In October 2026, Microsoft Publisher will reach its end of life. After that time, it will no longer be included in Microsoft 365 [...]
Best wishes,
Hans

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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

Post by JoeP »

Publisher is no longer included in the Microsoft 365/Office 365 plans for home and business but is still included in the enterprise plans. According to Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026 and not included in any plan.
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StuartR
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

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I don't use it for new publications, but I need to update various old ones.
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

Post by JoeP »

Do they have to remain in Publisher format? Could you proactively convert to PDF or WORD?
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StuartR
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

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I guess I'll have to convert them all to word. Is there an easy way to do this?
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HansV
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

Post by HansV »

Saving a .pub file as .docx only converts the text.
Saving as .pdf, then opening in Word preserves pictures, but the layout will probably be messed up.
Opening the .pdf in a PDF editor will probably produce better results.

There are many online Publisher to Word conversion utilities; I have no idea how good they are. Whether you want to use an online tool is up to you of course.
Best wishes,
Hans

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StuartR
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

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Thanks. That's about what I thought
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stuck
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

Post by stuck »

StuartR wrote:
05 Feb 2025, 07:39
I guess I'll have to convert them all to word. Is there an easy way to do this?
If you still have a working copy of MS Publisher then:
* one of the 'Save As' option is .docx format but it only saves the text
* another option is Save As .pdf, which does include everything

If you no longer have a working copy of MS Publisher then Libre Office can open MS Publisher files, see below. I've not tried it though so I don't know if it too picks out just the text.

Going forward consider using Affinity Publisher:
    https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/
It's not free but it's not expensive. Don't buy it right now though as the current price of £67.99 is the full list price. Wait until they have a sale on and you'll get it much cheaper. If you can wait until November / Black Friday it's likely to be half price.

Affinity Publisher can't open MS Publisher files directly, see this topic on the Affinity Forum:
    https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index. ... pub-files/
Other stuff I've read on the Affinity Forum (which I do regularly since I use Affinity Photo to edit my pictures) indicates that using PDF as an intermediate is the way most AF Publisher users get their MS Publisher files in AF Publisher.

Also, AF Publisher will have a learning curve since its way of doing things will be different to how MS Publisher works.

Ken

EDITED TO ADD:
Note the comment in that Affinity Forum topic I link to about using the Draw application in Libre Office as a publisher application. If your desktop publishing needs are simple that might be all you require.

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StuartR
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

Post by StuartR »

I currently have Publisher as part of Office 365.

The Publisher documents that I have are not very likely to be needed, but I would hate to lose them all because they can no longer be opened. Probably a save to PDF is the best bet here.
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

Post by kdock »

Like Stuck, I immediately checked to see if Affinity Publisher could open a MSFT file. Too bad. But you could try the following.

I recently went of a search to see if there was any way to scan tables and not have them turn into unusable boxes of text. And found a YouTube video on the following technique for recreating the structure of a table. Still, it might work...

From Publisher, save as a PDF using Microsoft's PDF printer. (This would work with any PDF program, I think.)
Open the PDF in Word - Word will probably tell you it's converting to an editable format.
If it does a good job and you can continue working with it, yay! Save it, edit it, go on your merry way.

If it doesn't...
Without editing the document in Word - Save again as a PDF - use Microsoft's PDF writer.
Open this new PDF in Word - it will probably tell you it's converting to an editable format.
See if Word did a better job of recreating the original formatting.

If you have a little time to try it, I'll be curious to know if it works.

Best, K

P.S. I have the Affinity Suite and love it. I've created 5.5 x 11 folded 4-page Holiday "newspapers" in it and find their Publisher quite easy to use.
"Hmm. What does this button do?" Said everyone before being ejected from a car, blown up, or deleting all the data from the mainframe.

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StuartR
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Re: Is Publisher still included in Office 365?

Post by StuartR »

It took me a few hours to search my hard drive for .pub files, open each one and save as .pdf, so I will at least be able see what the content of each of them was if I need to know in future. It would probably have been quicker to write a Macro to do this, but it's all done now.

Most of these are fairly simple booklets or posters, with lots of graphics and very simple text.
StuartR