Microsoft Publisher dies in October and your files do not open themselves

Microsoft Publisher reaches end of life in October 2026. It stops being included, stops being supported, and stops receiving fixes.

For a lot of small businesses this is a bigger deal than it sounds, because Publisher is where their printed material lives. Menus, flyers, price lists, newsletters, event programmes, membership forms. Often a decade of them, often built by someone who no longer works there.

The specific problem

The .pub format is not widely readable. Unlike a Word document, which almost anything will open, Publisher files are effectively only openable by Publisher. There is no meaningful ecosystem of alternatives that read them properly, and the online conversion tools that claim to do it tend to produce something that is technically a file and visually a mess.

So the risk is not that you cannot buy the software any more. It is that in two years you will need to change a phone number on a flyer and have no way to open the flyer.

The software going away is an inconvenience. Losing the ability to edit ten years of your own material is a different problem.

What to do before October

• Find your .pub files. They are usually scattered across a shared drive, a couple of desktops and somebody's email. Get them into one place first.
• Open each one and export a PDF. This preserves what the document looks like even if you later lose the ability to edit it. Do this while you still have working Publisher.
• Identify the handful you actually re-edit. Most businesses have four or five documents that get updated regularly and a hundred that will never change again. Only the first group needs a real migration.
• Rebuild that handful in whatever you are moving to, rather than converting them. A converted layout usually needs more fixing than a fresh one needs building.
• Do not rely on a conversion service being there later. If a format matters to you, get it out now while the software that wrote it still runs.

What to move to

There is no single obvious successor, which is part of why this is awkward. Canva covers a lot of the simpler ground and is where most small businesses will end up. Affinity Publisher is a proper desktop layout tool with a one time price. Scribus is free and open source and has a steeper learning curve than either. Word handles more than people expect for simple single page material and is already on the machine.

The honest answer is that each of these is a compromise for someone used to Publisher, which is a large part of why we are building something in this space ourselves. More on that when there is something to show rather than something to promise.

The point

October is not far away. Exporting PDFs from your existing files is boring and takes an afternoon, and it is the difference between an inconvenience and losing access to your own material.

If you want a hand working out what you have and what actually needs migrating, get in touch. It is much easier to do before the deadline than after.