Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Publisher was a

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using dedicated software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online co ...

application from

, differing from

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

in that the emphasis is placed on

page layout In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives. The high-level page layout involves deciding on the ...

and

graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art that involves creating visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdisciplinary branch of ...

rather than text composition and

proofreading Proofreading is a phase in the process of publishing where galley proofs are compared against the original manuscripts or graphic artworks, to identify transcription errors in the typesetting process. In the past, proofreaders would place corr ...

. It was discontinued in October 2026.

Overview

Publisher was included in higher-end editions of

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

, reflecting Microsoft's emphasis on the application as an easy-to-use and less expensive alternative to the "heavyweights" with a focus on the small-business market, where firms did not have dedicated design professionals available to make marketing materials and other documents. However, it had a relatively small share of the desktop publishing market, which is dominated by

Adobe InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application software, application produced by Adobe Inc., Adobe and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, ...

and formerly by

QuarkXPress QuarkXPress is desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. It runs on macOS and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and p ...

. While most Microsoft Office apps adopted

ribbons A ribbon or riband is a thin band of material, typically cloth but also plastic or sometimes metal, used primarily as decorative binding and tying. Cloth ribbons are made of natural materials such as silk, cotton, and jute and of synthetic mate ...

for their user interface starting with

Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on Novemb ...

, Publisher retained its

toolbar The toolbar, also called a bar or standard toolbar (originally known as ribbon), is a graphical control element on which on-screen icons can be used. A toolbar often allows for quick access to functions that are commonly used in the program. Some ...

s and did not adopt ribbons until

Microsoft Office 2010 Microsoft Office 2010 (codenamed Office 14) is a version of Microsoft Office for Microsoft Windows unveiled by Microsoft on May 15, 2009, and released to manufacturing on April 15, 2010, with General availability release, general availability on ...

. On February 15, 2024, Microsoft announced that Publisher will be discontinued on October 13, 2026. On the specified date, Publisher was no longer included in Microsoft 365 plans, and existing on-premises installations were no longer supported. This date marked the end of Publisher as a standalone Microsoft program since its initial release in 1991.

Compatibility

Several applications can import Publisher's

proprietary file format A proprietary file format is a file format of a company, organization, or individual that contains data that is ordered and stored according to a particular encoding-scheme, such that the decoding and interpretation of this stored data is easily ac ...

(.pub) for editing with some success, including

Collabora Online Collabora Online is an open source online office suite based on LibreOffice, enabling web-based collaborative real-time editing of word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and vector graphics. Optional apps are available for deskto ...

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite developed by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was created in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, itself a successor to StarOffice. The suite includes applications ...

, and

Scribus Scribus () is free and open-source desktop publishing (DTP) software available for most desktop operating systems. It is designed for layout, typesetting, and preparation of files for professional-quality image-setting equipment. Scribus can a ...

. Another option is to save the document as a separate EPS file for each individual page in the publication, and to then open the EPS files in the aforementioned applications or other applications. Publisher supports some other file formats, including Microsoft's

Enhanced Metafile Windows Metafile (WMF) is an image file format originally designed for Microsoft Windows in the 1990s. The original Windows Metafile format was not device-independent (though could be made more so with placement headers) and may contain both vector ...

(EMF) format, which is supported on Windows platforms. The Microsoft Publisher trial version can be used to view .pub files beyond the trial period.

Adobe PageMaker Aldus PageMaker (later Adobe PageMaker) is a desktop publishing computer program introduced in 1985 by the Aldus Corporation on the Apple Macintosh. The combination of the Macintosh's graphical user interface, PageMaker publishing software, and ...

also saved files with a .pub extension, but the two file formats were unrelated and incompatible.

Release history

References

External links

*
Microsoft Publisher blog
(last updated December 2009) on

MSDN Blogs Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was the division of Microsoft responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers and testers, such as hardware developers interested in the operating system (OS), and software developers developing ...

{{Authority control Desktop publishing software

Publisher Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

Products introduced in 1991

Overview

Compatibility

Release history

See also

References

External links