The short answer: install LibreOffice, which is free, and open the file in LibreOffice Draw. It needs no copy of Publisher at all — which, now that Microsoft has retired Publisher, is the situation most people are in. Below is how to do it properly, what to convert to, and what to watch for.
.pub file. If it is not
listed, set the file-type filter to All files.That is the whole method. For a handful of files it is the right answer and you do not need anything else.
They answer different questions and people regret picking only one. PDF is the copy you can open anywhere in ten years, print, and email to somebody who has never heard of LibreOffice — but it is awkward to edit. ODG keeps the document alive: text boxes, images and layout stay editable in LibreOffice Draw, which is not going anywhere.
Converting to .docx is the tempting mistake. Word is a
word processor and Publisher documents are layout documents; the conversion moves
the text across and abandons the design that was the point of using Publisher.
Publisher documents lean heavily on Calibri and Cambria, which are Microsoft fonts and are usually missing on a machine doing the conversion. When they are absent, text is re-flowed into a substitute and lines break in different places, which is what people mean when they say the layout "came out wrong".
Installing Carlito and Caladea — free fonts built to the same metrics as Calibri and Cambria — means text occupies exactly the same space it did before. It is a two-minute fix that removes most fidelity complaints, and it is worth doing before you convert anything you care about.
Being honest about this matters more than selling you something: converting a Publisher file is an editable rescue, not a pixel-perfect clone.
Usually fine: body and heading text, images, colours, page size, and the overall position of things on the page.
Worth checking: documents that used fonts you do not have, heavily overlapping elements, some automatic date and page-number fields, and very old files — Publisher 95–98 documents convert far less reliably than anything from 2000 onward.
Always: open anything important before you send it to a printer. A conversion that is 95% right is excellent for a newsletter archive and not good enough for something going on paper a thousand times.
Microsoft has retired Publisher. If you were on a Microsoft 365 subscription, the application was removed on October 1, 2026 — the files on your disk now have nothing to open them. If you own a perpetual Office 2021 licence, the program still runs but stopped receiving support on October 13, 2026.
Either way the files themselves are safe. Nothing was deleted. The problem is purely that the only program that read them is no longer available, which is why converting them now — on your own schedule, with time to check the results — beats doing it in a hurry the day somebody needs one.
Everything above works one file at a time. That is fine for five. For three hundred it is a day of opening, exporting twice, saving, and keeping track of which ones failed — and old archives always contain a few files that will not open at all.
That is the job this site does: upload the archive, get every file back as a PDF and an ODG, plus a report listing exactly what converted and what did not, so nothing fails silently. If fewer than 80% of your files rescue, you don't pay for it.
Or keep using the free method above — it is the same engine, and for a small archive it is genuinely the better answer.
No. The files on your disk are unaffected — nothing deleted them and nothing corrupted them. What changed is that Microsoft 365 no longer gives you a program that opens them. The files became unreadable rather than lost, which is why they can still be rescued.
No. Neither opens the format, and neither is a page-layout program in the way Publisher was. Even where people rebuild a Publisher document in Word by hand, the result usually fights them — text boxes, precise positioning and bleed are the things Publisher did and Word does not.
Yes, genuinely free and open source, with no account, trial or upsell. It is the same software this site uses under the hood to do conversions.
Usually very close, and occasionally not. Layout, images and positioning normally survive intact. Fonts are the common cause of drift: if a document used Calibri or Cambria and your machine lacks them, text reflows. Complex overlapping layouts and some text fields can shift. Always check an important document before sending it to print.
If you have a perpetual Office 2021 licence rather than a Microsoft 365 subscription, the program keeps working — it simply stopped receiving support and security fixes on October 13, 2026. That is a reason to convert on your own schedule rather than a reason to panic, but it is not a reason to keep the archive locked in a dead format indefinitely.