Beginning 1 October 2026, Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported as part of Microsoft 365. Many common Publisher scenarios are available in other Microsoft 365 apps, including Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.
Action Recommended: Before 1 October 2026, convert your existing Publisher files to PDF or Word format. After this date, you will no longer be able to open or edit these files with Microsoft Publisher.
This company is wild.
Where do we go from here? Affinity? InDesign? Quark? Scribus?
I actually forgot this happened until I saw Affinity Publisher was discontinued. This reminds me I need to convert my Affinity docs and migrate as well.
This is partly why I am exploring Scribus, as even if it’s not worked on actively it’s much less likely to just abruptly stop one day, and highly likely its successor software will have a tool to convert things over.
Decades ago I was using OpenOffice but it had a long way to go back then, so I stuck with MS Office all these years.
I’m sure I’ll come across something that doesn’t quite work right but it’s unlikely I’ll encounter an Excel application built on macros in the wild anymore. (famous last words)
n.b. I have no idea what the hell is up with Microsoft over the last year. I feel like HN could use a thread where people just share horror stories. I’ve heard about the CoPilot nonsense, the cramming of AI into everything, but I stuck to Windows 10 to avoid as much of it as possible, although now it’s EOL. That they’re just shitting on everything solid they’ve done over the years does not make any sense to me.
I think Scribus is a suitable replacement for Publisher? I don’t think it’s any worse but I don’t think it’s at the level where it can compete against InDesign and Quark. However the major upside is that it is open source and runs on Linux just fine.