Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026(support.microsoft.com) |
Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026(support.microsoft.com) |
Corel refugee here refusing to buy another upgrade license.
I have been using open and free code to do all I can.
Don't mind paying for great apps, and these guys offering almost all the operating systems I value in their universal license and at only $170?
Sweet deal, I may buy in.
That said, I find this software collection worth a donation:
Http://portableapps.com
It is possible to load a serious setup quicker than you are used to.
Very highly recommended.
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.
I remember using their software over 20 years ago, so it should be
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.)
Compare this to any SaaS app that disappears immediately.
So yeah, if you have any Publisher files, you're fucked.
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.
It's quite a nice app. Works 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).
Killing access to old files is an abomination of a choice.
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
O365 pretty much killed Office for us. We barely use it in house now. At best it's hosted email. We don't even use the calendar / contact stuff as it doesn't sync with any phones properly. Apple won there by a mile. If only they did an enterprise iCloud+ with custom domain we'd just stop paying for O365 I suspect other than for a couple of Excel die hards.
What's the point of coy language like this? This is a general pattern I've noticed of people using weasel words because they think it will protect them from liability. Stop this pretence that saying "thepiratebay" is going to get you in trouble. It won't. This is a forum for adults, so let's talk like adults without bringing euphemisms and self-censorship in here.
Unless you were doing it to seem humorous, in which case go ahead. I didn't find it humorous but humour is subjective.
And yet the Visio Stencil UX/UI is the absolute worst.
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)
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.
Woodworkers and machinists probably spend as much time on tool upkeep as programmers do futzing with updates, new plug-ins, etc.
And hey the only place left to get hammers sells 50 brands of identical, low quality hammers (all clearly made in the same factory) under a variety of inscrutable, all-caps brand names like AOXIUN and KUDUO.
So actually maybe the advice for hammers and software is the same ... if you rely on it, make sure you can build it yourself.
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.
It was obvious from day one that this would be a failure since it was strongly tied to the Metro UI (awesome on mobile, ugly as hell on desktop) and the Windows app store, all only available on an OS that never was competitive against its predecessor. Also it shipped with a .net implementation that was incompatible with the real one. I'm glad I skipped that tech entirely.
https://marketplace.appdirect.com/en-US/apps/345798/office-l...
It's fine to say that you don't like the subscription model, or the pricing, or telemetry, or "AI" thrown in everywhere, but saying that everything is "regressive feature simplification" is so obviously wrong and so easy to prove false that you're basically lying to our faces and pretending people won't notice.
You can program Excel functions in JavaScript, greatly improving the power of things you can do (especially in the web UI). Excel haa gained SVG support, all sorts of improved functions (CONCAT, TEXTJOIN, SWITCH), funnel graphs, a dark theme, better Pivot Tables, viable coauthoring (even with Sharepoint or OneDrive, coauth on Excel 2016 was rough) and so much more. That's just one app.
It's fine to say "I don't find this a good value" or "change X is a dealbreaker for me" but please don't degrade the conversation by telling obvious lies.
It funnels you down the cloud route pretty heavily which is at least in what we do is incredibly dangerous and leads to regulatory problems. What we end up with is a nightmare tangle of GPOs where we don't know what feature is going to be turned on next in a trivial update which will end up with our mandatory signed in O365, because that's how you have to pay for it, pushing content to OneDrive or something. Even the file save dialogs switched a while back to push cloud first and we had a nightmare even though OneDrive was disabled (!) because no one could use it suddenly.
THAT is a complete dealbreaker.
As mentioned, the calendar and contact management is so bad that we ended up using iCloud anyway for that.
There's also a better win for us which is moving to R with tidyverse. Less footguns, can work with people via a VCS fine, can wrap a whole data pipeline in automation in a makefile, doesn't go down for 2-3 days a year.
However, that incompatibility you point out, was present throughout all iterations.
Window 8 => 8.1 => 10 required rewrites, UWP/WinUI 2.0 => Win32/WinUI 3.0 dropped .NET Native and .NET 9 still isn't full AOT, C++/CX => C++/WinRT lost Visual Studio tooling and is nowadays in maintenance mode, yet gets sold as being the way for C++ devs.
Meanwhile, most of the faces on community meetings have changed since Windows 8 days, nowadays most seem fresh out of university without any Windows developer experience given the blank stares when questioned about feature XYZ becoming available, and bugs?, you only have to spend sometime digging around the Github repos.
Naturally, even the strongest advocate eventually gives up.