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Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

I used Publisher (2.0! and then 95) quite a bit in the mid to late 1990s. I haven't used it since then because Word now has all the features that were previously exclusive to Publisher, so its purpose has evaporated. It's certainly true that Word has bugs and frustrations but I'd be surprised if Publisher didn't too.

It's very odd that they propose PowerPoint as the Publisher replacement. How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!? Maybe most of the people left using Publisher actually only need PowerPoint's features, rather than the full power of Word?

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I'm going to imagine anyone who needs to make fold-out leaflets is going to end up either doing it in Creative Cloud (i.e. InDesign), or these days, will just do it in Figma or Canva.

Microsoft abandoning Publisher is just another example of Microsoft's endless tactical retreats. Eventually, they aren't going to have anything other than Word and Excel (and maybe Outlook, but I'd say it looks iffy for that one).

PowerPoint is probably the replacement because it doesn't restrict where things can be placed (at least not by default). Word would be much more suitable, if only they made and advertised some sort of DTP mode that would do away with the image position defaults and let users put things over margins.

Do you mean changed the default text box / picture / drawing canvas mode from "in line" to "in front of text" (which lets you put it anywhere, including over margins)? You actually can do that in advanced options. "DTP mode" sounds like marketing overkill for a simple option but maybe it would help.

Pretty much. The pattern I'm noticing is users see that drawing in Word is cumbersome (layout features "get in the way") while in PowerPoint they can put things all over the place, so they naturally gravitate towards PowerPoint when they feel they don't need a classic letter layout but rather an "empty canvas" they can do whatever with.

It can all be done in Word too, but most people I've seen using Word don't bother even setting image placement for each image or change margins. They just stick with what's default.

I actually agree with you that a whole mode is an overkill, but I think whatever they put in they'd have to market pretty well so users would consider it at all. So it also makes sense to me they'd say "use PowerPoint instead" as it is what many are already doing.

> How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!?

There appear to be templates for this in Powerpoint

You need more than a template if you're going to make a booklet by folding a piece of paper in 4 - half of the "pages" (quarter pages) need to be upside down.

In truth, I haven't tried this in Word either, although it appears to be possible in page setup. Maybe I just stopped using Publisher when I started getting duplex printers. Or even stopped needing silly layouts for school projects.

Isn’t that a feature that best sits in the printer dialog, to be used with whatever application you want?

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