Open Publisher Files After October 2026

The Short Answer

If you had Publisher through Microsoft 365, it stopped working on October 1, 2026. Your .pub files are still there. Microsoft just no longer gives you anything that opens them.

The free fix is LibreOffice. It opens .pub files on Windows and Mac, lets you edit them, and saves them as PDF. Do that once for every file you care about, and you won't depend on Publisher again.

What Changed, and When

Microsoft's advice was to save every Publisher file as PDF before the deadline. That's no help if the deadline has passed and your Publisher is gone. There are two ways to do it now: an old copy of Publisher if you can find one, or LibreOffice.

Open .pub Files Free With LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free, open-source office suite. Its drawing app, Draw, can read Publisher files from Publisher 98 onward.

1. Download LibreOffice from libreoffice.org and install it. It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
2. Open LibreOffice, click Open File, and choose your .pub file. It opens in LibreOffice Draw.
3. Check every page. Edit text or move things around if you need to.
4. Go to File → Export As → Export as PDF and save.

We tested this with sample files saved by Publisher 98, 2000 and 2007. All three opened and exported to PDF. LibreOffice's list of formats says "Publisher 98-2010", but later versions kept the same file format, and school IT departments point their Mac users to LibreOffice for exactly this.

The file never leaves your computer, which matters for newsletters, membership lists and programs full of names and phone numbers.

What Might Not Come Through Perfectly

• Fonts. If the file uses a font you don't have, LibreOffice uses a similar one. Different letter widths can push a word onto the next line or overflow a text box. Installing the original font fixes it.
• Complex layouts. Text flowing between linked boxes, text wrapped around pictures, and special effects like WordArt are the parts most likely to shift. Simple flyers, cards and certificates usually look right.
• Very old or damaged files. If a file won't open at all, try it in an old copy of Publisher (see below).

If you have an old printout or PDF of the document, compare the two before you rely on the new version.

If You Still Have an Old Copy of Publisher

The bought-once versions (Publisher 2016, 2019 and 2021) still work. If you have one, or a colleague, school or relative does, it gives the most faithful result:

1. Open the .pub file in Publisher.
2. Go to File → Save As, choose PDF as the file type, and save.

For a whole folder of files, Microsoft publishes a sample PowerShell script on its Publisher retirement support page that converts them in one go. To find every Publisher file on a Windows PC, search File Explorer for *.pub.

Keep Editing After Publisher

• Small changes: keep the file in LibreOffice Draw and save it in Draw's own format (.odg). It stays editable without Publisher.
• Moving to Word: Microsoft's suggested route is to save as PDF first, then open the PDF in Word, which converts it to an editable document. Expect to tidy the layout.
• Desktop publishing: Scribus, a free layout program, can also import .pub files. It's a better long-term home for newsletters and brochures.
• Reusing pieces: once you have a PDF, PDF to Images turns each page into a picture you can drop into Word, PowerPoint or an email. PDF Text Extractor copies the text out so you don't have to retype it.

About Online .pub Converters

Searching for help turns up plenty of sites that convert .pub to PDF if you upload the file. They work, but your document goes to someone else's server. For anything with personal details in it, use LibreOffice, which does the same job on your own computer.

Once you have your PDFs, the PDF merger and PDF compressor on this site combine and shrink them in your browser, without uploading them.