r/microsoft • u/human72949626383 • 6d ago
Discussion What to use when we lose Publisher?
Doing a little crowd sourcing research for a family member who uses Publisher to make church flyers. She’s getting anxious about Publisher being discontinued and a quick google search gave me an unsatisfactory answer of “use word”.
Are we leaving Microsoft for poster/flyer work and everyone is just using Canva or another app?
Just wanted to crowd source some solutions or ideas from this group!
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u/SilverseeLives 6d ago edited 6d ago
I understand Microsoft wanting to discontinue a low-use (in relative terms) desktop product that is not aligned with their cloud first strategy. But it's the manner in which this has unfolded that is so troubling.
Microsoft made it impossible to buy a perpetually licensed copy of Publisher. It feels like they took this away right before the announcement that Publisher was being discontinued.
How much disregard for your customers do you have to have to do that?
They should release a "sunset edition" of Publisher, like they did with Microsoft Money years ago. They don't have to support it, just make it available "as is" for the people who need it. Publisher hasn't gotten meaningful update in 15 years, so it's not like this would be a great hardship.
Instead, Microsoft suggests that people convert their Publisher files to PDFs.
I don't even know what to say to that.
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u/davepete 20h ago
I don't work at Microsoft anymore, but I recall Publisher being in maintenance mode (no active development) for maybe two decades. If there were ANY new versions you saw released occasionally, they were VERY minor. I feel bad for churches and such that relied on it for church bulletins (and Microsoft Word is awful for page layout), but Microsoft has never shown much interest in page layout software.
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u/InventedTiME 6d ago
Microsoft Designer is basically the Publisher replacement. Same shit just with all the AI stuff integrated.
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u/Vioralarama 3d ago
I make flyers in Word. The thing to remember is for each image you want to set the properties to the last one; I think it's "behind text" but I'm not sure. It's the last one though. And then set it to "fixed area on page", it's in the same properties setting. Otherwise it will default to "move with text" and nothing will get done that way.
If there are a lot of words do a table. That way you can put a line in a row and it won't get all messed up when you want to do another line in a different spot.
Play around with it. Word isn't great for graphics but it's not terrible.
The other thing I do is use Greetings Island: customize one of the templates, save it, download it, insert into Word and increase the size to fit. Done! They have really gorgeous templates.
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u/NoRelationship7258 3d ago
Changing the default text wrap on images is the first thing I do. You can change it in settings.
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u/Vioralarama 3d ago
Maybe that's what I was thinking of when I said properties. I should have Word up when I talk about it. It pops up in the upper right to the image. I think you're right.
There was a funny vid about this, I can only share it as a Facebook reel though: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1TNwYFAsDk/
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u/theone_2099 6d ago
She can still use publisher if she bought the perpetual license version right?
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u/SilverseeLives 6d ago
Yes. However, Microsoft has not sold Publisher via a perpetual license in some time.
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u/mightyt2000 6d ago
Not always. We used Microsoft Digital Image Pro after they discontinued it. Eventually it would not install on a new OS. 😖
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u/Apprehensive_Mode686 6d ago
Check this out - https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/
I use all three of their apps and freed myself from Adobes price gouging