Microsoft Publisher No Longer Supported After Oct 2026

[jwheeler]

Microsoft has announced Publisher will no longer be supported after Oct 2026. While this may not directly affect most of us since we don't use it to design, we do often get files that were created in it. Many smaller businesses and churches rely on it to make weekly and monthly bulletins in the Publisher templates. It appears Microsoft is going to be integrating many of the Publisher features into Word, and for fancier designs, they are pushing people to their version of Canva called Microsoft Designer.

Here's a forum with feedback from Publisher users.

 

[Ynot_UK]

Unfortunately many of this type of creator will use PowerPoint instead, with the no.1 issue of incorrect aspect ratio default for wide screen, vs ISO paper sizes. Only a few days ago We had one of these jobs, although the long, thin booklet did look ok

 

[kslight]

I’ll be honest, can’t say for certain the last time I saw a publisher file in the wild. I imagine for us, those kind of clients already shifted to Canva or PowerPoint.

 

[gregbatch]

I've got one client still using it. I have trained him to create usable PDFs from it, so I haven't touched native files for a long time. I may have to create a few Canva templates for him, or perhaps even Affinity Publisher templates, once Publisher is dead.

 

[Shawnd]

Who knows what the printing industry is going to look like in 2026. AI enabled printers will do the design work and then spit out the artwork to both digital and paper if you are rich enough to afford paper.

 

[WiseGuy]

My brother worked on the Publisher team back in the early 90's, I worked at Aldus on the prepress products.... I remember him trying to convince me Publisher was going to take over the GA/printing industry as the professional product of choice. Needless to say, that didn't happen. RIP Publisher!

 

[prepressdork]

I will say that when MS introduced version (I think it was 2003), they finally added CMYK and spot color output capabilities which was a home run. In the last year, I bought the latest version of Office and discovered that the CMYK and spot color support was removed from Publisher (if it's there, I can't find it). With all that said, I personally won't miss Publisher. Unfortunately, users are starting to adopt Canva which has its own set of headaches.

 

[tngcas]

I’ll be honest, can’t say for certain the last time I saw a publisher file in the wild. I imagine for us, those kind of clients already shifted to Canva or PowerPoint.

Last week. :-( Luckily I still have my screenshots of all the screens you have to go to, to export as a pdf file since I no longer have a publisher program on my computer.

 

[gregbatch]

...I bought the latest version of Office and discovered that the CMYK and spot color support was removed from Publisher (if it's there, I can't find it).

Still there in mine.

 

[prepressdork]

Still there in mine.

Can you tell me where and which specific version of Publisher you have?

 

[jwheeler]

Click on "More Fill Colors", the select "Custom" or "Pantone" tab. CMYK will appear under color mode in the "Custom" tab. I have Microsoft 365 version 2406 (which I believe is the latest as our organization's PC's automatically update.

See screenshots below:

 

[prepressdork]

Ah ha! There it is!

Thank you so much,
pd