Microsoft has announced that it will no longer support MS Publisher from Oct 2026. It was always bundled with MS-office packages as a graphics / publishing tool, but will no longer be updated.
I don’t use it or other alternatives often enough to have a real opinion, but I did find it simple to use and play with, unlike a lot of other drawing and compositional programs which assume some continuing familiarity and adeptness. I have some .PUB files I still use but will need to convert or re-create these.
In the past I have used it to compose conference posters, newsletters and things with mixes of pics and words where you want to shunt, squeeze, embiggen or fine-tune them until they look just right. Trying that in Word or Powerpoint is a good way to make your brain explode, and never looks any good.
What alternatives can you recommend that are:
Free / negligible cost
Easy for the stupid, lazy or older dog who cannot learn new tricks to use
Produce a decent quality A5, A4, A3 or A2 size output
Canva is what everyone I know has moved to. Does in minutes what used to take hours in Publisher, and ends up looking a lot better too. But it’s online only.
For offline you can try the free Affinity or the libre Scribus, but neither is as simple or easy to use as Publisher was.
Adobe InDesign is the behemoth, but it’s very expensive (subscription based) and has a steep learning curve. It runs circles around Publisher once you know it though.
Well, you can continue to do what I do in these situations, and simply continue to use it as long it works in your version of Windows, which will likely be a long time. Just know that it won’t be getting updates, which can actually be considered a feature, not a bug!
Microsoft claims it’s being discontinued due to decreasing demand and “an aging code base”, which I take to actually mean “not suitable for a ripoff subscription based ‘cloud’ model”. They offer Word, Powerpoint, and Microsoft Designer as alternatives. I did use Publisher briefly in the distant past and nothing comes to mind that cannot be done just fine with those other tools.
As @Reply says, the designer guys I used to work with loved Canva.
Easier, faster than MS Publisher. Plus a number of file “save as” options, which I believe includes MS Publisher.
(Note, I am a nerd, not a designer, and the rare visual presentations I make, I use Google Slides, which is not really comparable. So take with as much salt as you care to pinch)