Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

support.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 71 posts

Re: Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

#21

Post by kstrauser »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #18
falkensmaize wrote: post #11

Serif makes a very capable alternative also called Publisher. I really like their software - you can buy it without a subscription and it's very polished. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher

Never heard of this company but the website makes these products look very mature. How does it compare to Adobe? 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.

Affinity’s stuff is freaking fantastic. I’m not a professional graphic designer but I spend enough time in such apps to want to have nice ones. Adobe’s apps are insanely expensive for occasional use. Affinity is very affordable, with the main complaint I’ve heard being that they aren’t identical clones of Creative Suite.

Re: Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

#22

Post by ozbonus »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #18
falkensmaize wrote: post #11

Serif makes a very capable alternative also called Publisher. I really like their software - you can buy it without a subscription and it's very polished. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher

Never heard of this company but the website makes these products look very mature. How does it compare to Adobe? 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 use their products daily both professionally and personally, mostly Designer and Publisher. Coming from someone who also used to use Adobe products, the affinity suite meets my needs almost perfectly. There are some times when I sorely miss a feature, like bitmap tracing and proper vector brushes in Designer and variable spread sizes in Publisher. That said, if you're going to pay for software, they're 100% worth the price.

Re: Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

#24

Post by brendoelfrendo »

falkensmaize wrote: post #11

Serif makes a very capable alternative also called Publisher. I really like their software - you can buy it without a subscription and it's very polished. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher

Unfortunately, they were acquired by Canva last year, so I feel like it's only a matter of time before things go downhill.

Re: Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

#25

Post by skissane »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #14
skissane wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought the point of office was to be paid tools for professionals? 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…

I consider small business to be the professionals I refer to. Professional as in paid tools, not desktop publishing businesses.

> Professional as in paid tools, not desktop publishing businesses.

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)

Re: Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

#26

Post by tracker1 »

exhilaration wrote: post #19
zdw wrote: post #10

Next should be Visio, which is more than replaced by diagrams.net/draw.io

Nah, Microsoft makes good money from Visio licenses - I'm sure it more than pays for itself and helps keep the megacorps locked in. All of our org's corporate laptops come with Office but you can request Visio if you need it - the license cost gets charged back to your department.

The mentioned alternatives also don't compare to what Visio has in terms of breadth for iconography, etc. It's just a bit better, which may not always be the case. That said, MS is definitely making enough to keep that ball rolling in terms of development.

Re: Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

#27

Post by s0rce »

ajxs wrote: post #6

I owe a debt of gratitude to Microsoft Publisher. Back in 1997 I was regularly using Microsoft Publisher for my primary school assignments. As soon as I realised that you could use it to create webpages, I was hooked! I was a bit too young at that point to understand coding things by hand, but with Publisher I could dive right in. And I haven't stopped since!

I remember making a webpage with publisher, I think it might still live on archive.org!

Re: Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

#28

Post by datavirtue »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #16

Sad to see classic Microsoft applications that are actually loved shut down, only to be replaced by things like Windows 11, that are made to be maximally invasive and anti-user.

Did Microsoft open source Publisher?

Re: Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

#30

Post by s0rce »

skissane wrote: post #12
throwaway48476 wrote: post #8

I thought the point of office was to be paid tools for professionals? I last used publisher a week ago. Instead of software it seems they just want to push ads and AI slop. Shameful.

> I thought the point of office was to be paid tools for professionals? 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…

I only used it for hobbies and school projects but I think I moved from Publisher to InDesign about 20 years ago. FrameMaker seemed too complicated and never really understood it. I typeset my wife's PhD thesis in Latex which so painful that I did mine in MS Word.
Post reply on HN