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Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026
- zdw 2y agoNext should be Visio, which is more than replaced by diagrams.net/draw.io
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoNothing comes close to matching the underlying power of Visio shapesheets.
- exhilaration 2y agoNah, Microsoft makes good money from Visio licenses - I'm sure it more than pays for itself and helps keep the megacorps locked in. All of our org's corporate laptops come with Office but you can request Visio if you need it - the license cost gets charged back to your department.
- tracker1 2y agoThe mentioned alternatives also don't compare to what Visio has in terms of breadth for iconography, etc. It's just a bit better, which may not always be the case. That said, MS is definitely making enough to keep that ball rolling in terms of development.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago> also don't compare to what Visio has in terms of breadth for iconography, etc. And yet the Visio Stencil UX/UI is the absolute worst.
- tech234a 2y agoPrevious discussion about this article from a year ago, though it looks like more details have been added since then (24 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39392257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39392257
- whatever1 2y agoI don’t think it was meaningfully updated for years. And now that web browsers grown to the point we have apps like draw.io or figma, I think it s was the right choice
- Dylan16807 2y agoDeciding not to update it anymore is probably the right choice. Killing access to old files is an abomination of a choice.
- CivBase 2y agoAre you confusing Publisher with Visio?
- LeoPanthera 2y agoIf you have a Mac (or an iThing), Apple Pages offers a "Page layout" mode (distinct from "Word Processing" mode) that includes a bunch of nicely designed templates. It's quite a nice app. Works well.
- xnx 2y agoRIP. I'm very thankful that the desktop version of Publisher should be able to run in perpetuity in emulation. Compare this to any SaaS app that disappears immediately.
- genter 2y ago> Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher. So yeah, if you have any Publisher files, you're fucked.
- tchbnl 2y agoI wonder when exactly Microsoft dropped mask and actively decided to fuck over paying customers on the regular. They have zero respect for their users.
- howthewut 2y ago[dead]
- userbinator 2y agoIMHO Windows 8 era (~2012) is when things started to go down the drain noticeably quickly.
- pjmlp 2y agoIncluding desktop development, as one ex-advocate for WinRT, which I considered to be what .NET 1.0 should have been in first place, given the original idea of COM+ Runtime vNext, they really messed up the whole development story multiple times, always demanding a rewrite as if that is a minor issue. However, nowadays, run away from anything that resembles WinRT tooling, keep to tried and true Win32, Forms, WPF, and even MFC, or plain Web, versus anything that builds on top of WinRT, unless the desired API is only available via WinRT.
- gwervc 2y ago
- ajxs 2y agoI owe a debt of gratitude to Microsoft Publisher. Back in 1997 I was regularly using Microsoft Publisher for my primary school assignments. As soon as I realised that you could use it to create webpages, I was hooked! I was a bit too young at that point to understand coding things by hand, but with Publisher I could dive right in. And I haven't stopped since!
- sundvor 2y agoI started with PageStream on the Amiga then later went to Publisher on the PC; I used both of them heaps, primarily for print - got myself a HP LaserJet 4P which was just glorious. Did club newsletters, school works / assignments, cafe menus, everything. Great times. I actually bought the boxed edition of PageStream with my paper boy money, even though I was just a high school student at the time. That's how much into it I was. :-) (The skillsets picked up from this along with Assembly on the Amiga transitioned reasonably well into a career of web development and software engineering.)
- s0rce 2y agoI remember making a webpage with publisher, I think it might still live on archive.org!
- throwaway48476 2y agoI thought the point of office was to be paid tools for professionals? I last used publisher a week ago. Instead of software it seems they just want to push ads and AI slop. Shameful.
- skissane 2y ago> I thought the point of office was to be paid tools for professionals? Desktop publishing professionals don’t use Publisher - nowadays mostly they use Adobe InDesign, 20 years ago it was mainly QuarkXpress. Also Adobe FrameMaker - InDesign is more heavily used for consumer-facing output such as magazines and brochures, FrameMaker more for technical documentation Microsoft Publisher was always a tool targeted at home users, small businesses-even if some of its users were “professionals” in other contexts it was never a professional tool
- throwaway48476 2y agoI consider small business to be the professionals I refer to. Professional as in paid tools, not desktop publishing businesses.
- skissane 2y ago> Professional as in paid tools, not desktop publishing businesses. What I’m calling “professional” tools (so not Publisher) aren’t only used by desktop publishing businesses. Only time I’ve ever been professionally involved in desktop publishing, was when I worked for a university - they used QuarkXpress for official university publications, such as the annual course catalog. I wrote a web-based database to store the course catalog (somewhat unusual tech stack of Apache+PHP on Solaris SPARC talking to MSSQL on Windows - we had our reasons) - staff would use its admin interface to CRUD course descriptions, which would then be published to the university website in HTML, and exported to QuarkXpress for printed publication. Originally I tried exporting it as XML but found QuarkXpress XML import feature too buggy, had much more success generating Quark’s proprietary XTG (aka XPress Tags) format (which looks a bit like HTML/XML/SGML but isn’t any of them)
- 2y ago
- falkensmaize 2y agoSerif makes a very capable alternative also called Publisher. I really like their software - you can buy it without a subscription and it's very polished. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoNever heard of this company but the website makes these products look very mature. How does it compare to Adobe? It would be great to see someone like this make an alternative to Office as well. I’d be glad to pay. I know some open source options exist but they always feel behind the times to me compared to Office.
- odux 2y agoI have used Affinity photo and it is a really powerful alternative to photoshop. Have not used any other products but have been very impressed with Affinity photo.
- kstrauser 2y agoAffinity’s stuff is freaking fantastic. I’m not a professional graphic designer but I spend enough time in such apps to want to have nice ones. Adobe’s apps are insanely expensive for occasional use. Affinity is very affordable, with the main complaint I’ve heard being that they aren’t identical clones of Creative Suite.
- ozbonus 2y agoI use their products daily both professionally and personally, mostly Designer and Publisher. Coming from someone who also used to use Adobe products, the affinity suite meets my needs almost perfectly. There are some times when I sorely miss a feature, like bitmap tracing and proper vector brushes in Designer and variable spread sizes in Publisher. That said, if you're going to pay for software, they're 100% worth the price.
- prox 2y ago
- mjevans 2y agoMind boggling. This isn't even a feature freeze / slow deprecation, it's a hard cut?
- not_a_bot_4sho 2y agoIt was originally announced in late 2023.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoSad to see classic Microsoft applications that are actually loved shut down, only to be replaced by things like Windows 11, that are made to be maximally invasive and anti-user.
- datavirtue 2y agoDid Microsoft open source Publisher?
- paxys 2y agoWow I remember using this in...1998 I think. "Desktop publishing" was quite the rage back then.
- tacomeow 2y ago[dead]
- omnibrain 2y agoBack in the 90ies, in "middle school", we did the layout in our school newspaper with that. It made me even considering a DTP career.
- BrenBarn 2y agoI used this for all kinds of school projects and stuff back in the 90s. I even used it to make birthday cards because it had a handy template to print out in a way that you would fold in four to make the card. It was my first exposure to "word art" which still holds a strange fascination. Every once in a while I'd wonder whatever happened to it. I guess now I know.
- geff82 2y agoLibreoffice Draw is an often overlooked application that I've been using for years to create one-page/two-page designed documents. It has become quite powerful over the years. Also, you might want to have a look at the open source "Scribus". I never liked it too much, but it gets a lot of jobs done.
- exceptione 2y agoScribus is on a whole different level as a direct competitor Adobe Indesign. Scribus is for professional dtp.
- VladStanimir 2y agoI think Scribus was mentioned as an alternative to MS Publisher.
- exceptione 2y agoScribus and Indesign are for professionals. MS Publisher is not. Yes, Scribus could do anything Publisher can as it provides a superset of features compared to the latter. But I think it would be confusing for people that don't understand color profiles, offset press and all the relevant stuff professionals care about. The bells and whistles are there for a reason.
- arp242 2y agoI used Publisher to edit the local scouting magazine about 15/20 years ago. I inherited that from the previous guy. It's one of the few Microsoft products that I actually enjoyed using: I felt it worked pretty well. Eventually I migrated to Scribus, because I could use that from my FreeBSD desktop. I'm cool like that. > Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher Ugh ... Local desktop software mostly just keeps working, even old versions (we used a pretty old Publisher version, as we had a license for that). I know there's a year and a half of lead-time, but lots of smaller publications that are already on Publisher and work fine now need to migrate. Great. And Word and PowerPoint have a completely different workflow; IMHO it's not really a replacement. It's like deprecating Vim and telling everyone Emacs is the replacement. Like, no: yes, it can do everything Vim can, but it's completely different (even with the "Vim mode" plugin things).
- jlaporte 2y agoAnd not a word of protest was uttered.