Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

support.microsoft.com

46 pointstech234a24 comments

I recommend jumping into Affinity Publisher (https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher) instead. All Affinity software, by the way, is great. Good x-platform support, resonable prices (and they go on sale often), powerful enough compared to Adobe suite and most importantly: no subscriptions.

I second this. Affinity has a fantastic suite of tools that is great value for money.

Best benefit of all: being able to ditch the intrusive crap Adobe forces on you when you install their stuff.

Oh cool, I had already bought it (and forgot about it!). Unfortunately, it doesn't support opening MS Publisher documents directly. I'm a bit wary about converting my (very few) MS Publisher documents to PDF to import them. Is there any better solution?

I love the Affinity products and their business model. Just wish they had a Linux version :(

This is a bummer, but since Publisher is an installable program and Microsoft has been very good about backward compatibility, it should be possible to run Publisher forever (or at least in an emulator). This is much better than when web services get shut down.

To anyone looking for an alternative, the best free and open source desktop publishing software is Scribus. The look and feel of Scribus is closer to that of professional applications like Adobe InDesign. Scribus is able to import Microsoft Publisher files, though I've never tried the feature. Unlike Publisher and most other desktop publishing applications, Scribus also works on Linux.

https://www.scribus.net/

I remember when we had to do any fancy layout stuff (like a brochure) in school, we had to use Publisher. For most kids, this was very restrictive because their home computers only had the basic office suite but my parents had the upgraded version so we had it.

Microsoft Publisher was great for making banners and posters for small businesses. It’s basically free for people with Office. Anyone knows a suitable replacement? Is it all Canva from now on?

Kittl and Adobe Express are two other great alternatives to Canva.

I have used Scribus in the past, when I needed this type of software. https://www.scribus.net/

This will hurt a lot of institutions who have sometimes decades of content.

I don't see why a tool like this can't be made free / unsupported, or if IP allows, even open-source.

All that archival content is dead the instant the license servers go down.

This is also very unlike Microsoft, who usually cares so much about client business continuity. It's more a Google thing. That's the whole reason people pick Microsoft.

There is some existing open source work here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libmspub

It's limited, LibreOffice does a good job but it has still got compatibility problems.

I'm sure they'd welcome bug reports or patches related to any issues you run into. Seems like your only option other than keeping an ancient and unsupported copy of Publisher in a VM.

I don’t use Publisher, but have done some code patches to the widgeting toolkit used by LibreOffice. I’ve seen bug reports already :-) somebody would need to fix them…

Yeah, Microsoft have screwed up with this one. Publisher had a market (still does) and so far as I'm aware despite them saying that you can do the same thing as you did in Publisher in Word, you can't open Publisher files in Word.

That's the issue. If you could open them in Word, then I could understand them getting rid of Publisher. But you can't, so it doesn't make any sense.

RIP Publisher, you were the source of countless paper airplanes throughout school. And while you may no longer be the DPS we use, you will be the one we remember (at least for this nerd).

Now do MS Access. But seriously, this is kind of a bummer and a lot of people are going to be left high and dry. This is like when they started messing with paint.

MS Access still keeps a whole load of orgs running (whether they know it or not!)

But now you've also got Power Apps, which is kinda like the "New MS Access". So if you had sprawls of Access databases before, you can look forward to sprawls of Power Apps instead. I've already seen Power Apps keeping an important business process running, until the user that deployed it leaves the org and it just dies...

I'd agree if Power Apps had a programming language backing it up. Say what you want about VBA, but it's at least a programming language. The databases and UIs were often just along for the ride, in my experience. The ability to run code was what made MS Access so useful to me. Power Apps just isn't there, yet, I don't think.

PowerApps can call external services, such as Azure Functions.

Power Apps are extensible via PowerFX, Canvas components, Web APIs and .NET SDK, or do you mean having some programing right there in the canvas designer?

I was joking of course. There's just a bunch of business critical stuff where i work that runs through old access DB's and I'd love for MSFT to sunset it and force everyone to have to confront some old business processes with new eyes.

FileMaker Pro enters the chat.

FMP: I'm still alive.

Paradox enters the chat.

Paradox: I'm still alive too!

----

Let me regale you of tales of FMP running on 1U Xserve's concealing retail IDE PATA drives and no concept of redundant power supplies.

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