Microsoft Publisher is ending on October 1, 2026: what to do this week

If your office makes a bulletin, a newsletter or a flyer in Microsoft Publisher, you have a deadline. It is worth spending an hour on this week, while the program is still on your computer and still opens your files.

The two dates, and what each one means

Microsoft has published two dates, and they do different things.

October 1, 2026. If you get Office through a Microsoft 365 subscription, Publisher goes away. Microsoft’s support page is blunt about it: “Microsoft 365 subscribers will not be able to access Publisher after October 1, 2026.” The app disappears from the Office apps on your machine. Your .pub files stay on the disk, but no Microsoft program on that computer opens them any more. (LibreOffice can open .pub files, with mixed results — see the conversion guide.)

October 13, 2026. If you bought Office outright — Office 2021, or Office LTSC 2021 — support for the perpetual version of Publisher ends. This one is gentler than it sounds. Publisher keeps working. It does not uninstall itself, and it still opens your files. What stops is the maintenance: no more security fixes, no more bug fixes, no support if something breaks.

So one group loses the program, and one group keeps a program that nobody is looking after any more. Both groups need the same thing in the end, which is a way to make next month’s bulletin that does not depend on Publisher.

Who this actually hits

Not designers. The people who feel this are the ones who print something on a schedule: the church volunteer who makes the Sunday bulletin, the school secretary who sends a newsletter home at the end of term, the club treasurer who prints an agenda for the committee, the shop that puts out a flyer before a sale.

These are offices where one person learned Publisher years ago, and everything since has been a copy of last week’s file with the text changed. That is a sensible way to work. It is also the way of working that breaks when the program disappears.

Step 1, today: archive everything as PDF

Before you think about replacements, make a copy of your work that will outlive the software.

Open every .pub file you still care about and save it as a PDF. Microsoft’s own instructions are: open the Publisher file, go to File > Save as, choose where to save it, then “Select PDF as the file type and Save.”

Do this while Publisher is still on the machine. This is the step with a deadline attached, and it is the one people put off.

A PDF is the right archive for two reasons. It keeps the page exactly as it printed, so you can reprint last year’s carol service sheet without rebuilding it. And it is a format that everything opens: Word, Affinity, a web browser, a print shop’s machine. You are converting a file that one dying program can read into a file that everything can read.

Put them all in one folder, with the year in the name. You will not think about them again until the day you need one.

Step 2: pick a replacement

There are three sensible answers, and which one is right depends on your office rather than on which is best in the abstract.

Word. You already have it, your volunteers already know it, and it is genuinely fine for bulletins and newsletters — anything that is mostly text in a predictable layout. Microsoft itself points Publisher users at Word for newsletters, programs, letterhead, labels and certificates, and at PowerPoint for banners, signs and posters. The trade-off is that Word thinks in terms of a flowing document, not a page, so fiddly layouts fight back.

Affinity. The closest thing to Publisher’s way of working: you place things on a page and they stay where you put them. The Methodist Church’s guidance for churches calls it “the closest direct replacement for Microsoft Publisher.” The app is free to download now, though it asks you to sign in with a free Canva account. There is a learning curve, and it is real — budget an afternoon, not ten minutes.

Canva. Web-based, template-driven, free for registered charities, and good for flyers and posters where you want something to look designed without doing the designing. Less suited to a four-page order of service.

Plenty of offices end up using two: something quick for posters, something more deliberate for the weekly document. If you want a second opinion aimed squarely at church offices, the Methodist guidance and the CRC Network post are both written by people in the same position as you — the CRC one ends with a free Word bulletin template, which tells you which way that denomination went.

Step 3: rebuild three to five documents, not three hundred

This is the part that turns a daunting job into a short one.

You do not need to convert your whole archive. You need to be able to produce next week’s document. Look at what you have actually printed this year and you will almost certainly find it is a handful of things repeated: the weekly bulletin, the monthly newsletter, an order of service, a flyer when something is on.

Rebuild those. Everything else is already safe as a PDF from step 1, and if you ever need one again you can rebuild it then, once, instead of converting hundreds of files you will never open.

Starting from a template rather than a blank page is the difference between an afternoon and a fortnight. Our free half-fold bulletin template for Word is a good place to test whether this is going to be painful, and the full template pack covers the rest of the documents in both Word and Affinity, in US Letter and A4.

A checklist you can work through

1. Find every .pub file — the office PC, the shared drive, old email attachments — and put them in one folder.
2. Save each one as a PDF while Publisher still runs. Back that folder up somewhere that is not the office PC.
3. Write down the documents you actually print on a schedule. It will be a short list.
4. Pick a replacement: Word if you want the least disruption, Affinity if you want the closest fit, Canva for quick visual work.
5. Rebuild that short list from templates, starting with whichever one goes out most often.
6. Print one of each and check it on paper before the deadline, not after.

The deadline is fixed, but the work is not large. An hour of archiving this week and an afternoon of rebuilding is genuinely most of it.