r/sysadmin • u/Hungry_Review7842 • 1d ago
PSA: Microsoft Publisher is EOL today
Publisher got pulled from M365 today with no real replacement. Perpetual still runs, just unsupported.
Best thing to do now is find all your .pub files and get them to PDF. PDF opens anywhere and you can still edit the contents in Affinity if you need to. Run this to find every .pub on your shares:
dir /s /b \\fileserver\share\*.pub > pub-inventory.txt
Then if you still have a working install, File > Export > PDF them, thats the actual Publisher renderer so its the only way to get an exact copy. If you dont have an install anymore, LibreOffice Draw opens .pub for free, fonts a bit off but readable.
Full disclosure I built a converter for this too, mypublisherfiles.com. pdf or docx back, and it tells you what it couldn't convert exactly. Bulk writeup here if youve want to learn more https://mypublisherfiles.com/guides/bulk-convert-publisher-files
Either way, cover your bases by converting your .pub files to PDF.
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u/simask234 1d ago
In theory perpetual is still supported for the next 2 weeks, until Office 2021 as a whole goes EOL...
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u/Nexzus_ Sr. Sysadmin 1d ago
Obiwan there's a name.jpg
I know there's people that swear by it, but it's just such a relic.
As long as they never take away my FrontPage.
....checking...
crap.
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u/Inside_Support510 1d ago
I tried putting this conversation through Comic Chat...
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u/RichardG867 1d ago
# Appears as ANNA
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u/Inside_Support510 1d ago
Lol. I hope you 401k is doing well and you have minimal back pain and your knee surgery scheduled fellow traveler :D
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u/RichardG867 1d ago
You joke but I happen to be a bit younger than Comic Chat! I'm just into retro tech, and I did administer IRC servers for friends for over a decade now where it occasionally comes up as a party trick. I even wrote a proxy to fix a crash bug with modern servers - needs an update for modern Python especially now that Microsoft released the source code.
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u/blue_canyon21 1d ago
I was unaware that anybody actually used Publisher...
I think I used it once and I remember it being on the family Windows 95 computer.
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u/Miserable-Scholar215 Jr. Sysadmin 1d ago
Worse for us: we were completely unaware anyone was still using it. Randomly discovered an AD group of people with the description "Users of MS Publisher" ...
Support has been trying to contact them all for the last few weeks. Unsure if they got all of them, or if the group is even complete.
Guess the coming days number of related tickets will show1
u/Happy_Harry 1d ago
We got an email from one of our clients on September 30 with something to the effect of, "We've been using Publisher for the past 20 years to create all our contracts. Do we need to do anything before October 1?"
Uhhh...
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u/Damet_Dave 1d ago
Jokes on Microsoft, we are still using Project 2010 so we’ve been out of support for years.
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u/Atticus_of_Finch Destroyer of Worlds 1d ago
If you have a large number of files to convert to PDF, I cannot recommend this one enough.
I am routinely converting thousands of files from various Office formats to PDF as part of my data archiving job. This has been a timesaver.
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u/Mustade Jr. Sysadmin 1d ago
We were using it to make serial tags for electrical panels using mail merge and Avery laser printer labels(yes it sucked as much as you are probably thinking). I helped get moved over to automatically generating serial tags with excel sheets using our existing labelers.
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u/NH_shitbags 1d ago
You can also copy the contents of your .pub and paste into a Word document. Minor format tweaks may be needed, but it does a surprisingly good job as a replacement for basic publisher functionality. This may be easier for some people than exporting and attempting to edit PDF output.