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Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026

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

#51

Post by pjmlp »

userbinator wrote: post #37
tchbnl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder when exactly Microsoft dropped mask and actively decided to fuck over paying customers on the regular. They have zero respect for their users.

IMHO Windows 8 era (~2012) is when things started to go down the drain noticeably quickly.

Including desktop development, as one ex-advocate for WinRT, which I considered to be what .NET 1.0 should have been in first place, given the original idea of COM+ Runtime vNext, they really messed up the whole development story multiple times, always demanding a rewrite as if that is a minor issue.

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.

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

#52

Post by Arainach »

ohgr wrote: post #44
bigtimesink wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's accurate, but a certain nautical themed torrent directory currently lists Office 2016 as the third most popular Application torrent.

Not surprised. Office 2016 is basically the "last" version of Microsoft Office. All the O365 stuff is pretty much regressive feature simplification over the top of it and in some cases abhorrent user hostile garbage (new outlook). 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.…

"X was the last version with any features" is among the laziest of internet tropes.

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.

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

#53

Post by derkster »

ohgr wrote: post #44
bigtimesink wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's accurate, but a certain nautical themed torrent directory currently lists Office 2016 as the third most popular Application torrent.

Not surprised. Office 2016 is basically the "last" version of Microsoft Office. All the O365 stuff is pretty much regressive feature simplification over the top of it and in some cases abhorrent user hostile garbage (new outlook). 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.…

There's still Office LTSC version, which will likely exist for the foreseeable future. I believe they require internet for activation, and are offline afterwards.

https://marketplace.appdirect.com/en-US/apps/345798/office-l...

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

#54

Post by reddalo »

ohgr wrote: post #44
bigtimesink wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's accurate, but a certain nautical themed torrent directory currently lists Office 2016 as the third most popular Application torrent.

Not surprised. Office 2016 is basically the "last" version of Microsoft Office. All the O365 stuff is pretty much regressive feature simplification over the top of it and in some cases abhorrent user hostile garbage (new outlook). 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.…

Office 2016? To me, the "last" version is Office 2003. Everything that came after is horrible (the ribbon? I still can't stand it).

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

#55

Post by exceptione »

geff82 wrote: post #50

Libreoffice Draw is an often overlooked application that I've been using for years to create one-page/two-page designed documents. It has become quite powerful over the years. 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.

Scribus is on a whole different level as a direct competitor Adobe Indesign. Scribus is for professional dtp.

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

#56

Post by nindalf »

bigtimesink wrote: post #40
xnx wrote: post #5

RIP. I'm very thankful that the desktop version of Publisher should be able to run in perpetuity in emulation. Compare this to any SaaS app that disappears immediately.

I'm not sure if it's accurate, but a certain nautical themed torrent directory currently lists Office 2016 as the third most popular Application torrent.

> nautical themed torrent directory

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.

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

#57

Post by ohgr »

Arainach wrote: post #52
ohgr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not surprised. Office 2016 is basically the "last" version of Microsoft Office. All the O365 stuff is pretty much regressive feature simplification over the top of it and in some cases abhorrent user hostile garbage (new outlook). 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.…

"X was the last version with any features" is among the laziest of internet tropes. 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 f…

Well no it's not lazy at all. I'll tell you why.

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.

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

#58

Post by VladStanimir »

exceptione wrote: post #55
geff82 wrote: post #50

Libreoffice Draw is an often overlooked application that I've been using for years to create one-page/two-page designed documents. It has become quite powerful over the years. 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.

Scribus is on a whole different level as a direct competitor Adobe Indesign. Scribus is for professional dtp.

I think Scribus was mentioned as an alternative to MS Publisher.

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

#59

Post by gwervc »

pjmlp wrote: post #51
userbinator wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO Windows 8 era (~2012) is when things started to go down the drain noticeably quickly.

Including desktop development, as one ex-advocate for WinRT, which I considered to be what .NET 1.0 should have been in first place, given the original idea of COM+ Runtime vNext, they really messed up the whole development story multiple times, always demanding a rewrite as if that is a minor issue. However, nowadays, run away from anything that resembles WinRT tooling, keep to tried and true Win32, Forms, WPF, and…

> 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.

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

#60

Post by spiderfarmer »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #24
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.

It’s been a year, it’s still great. I already wasn’t sure they would survive before the acquisition, so the move doesn’t make that much of a difference in terms of stability.
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