Open a Publisher file — before and after Publisher is gone
Microsoft is retiring Publisher: support ends in 2026, and the Microsoft 365 version will stop working entirely. That leaves decades of church newsletters, club flyers, school programs, and takeout menus stranded in .pub files that nothing else opens. If you’ve inherited one of those files — often from a volunteer who set it up fifteen years ago and has long since moved on — you can open it here, in your browser, right now. Every page comes out as an SVG you can edit in free tools like Inkscape (or in Figma or Illustrator), plus a PNG ready to attach to an email or post online. Nothing gets installed and nothing gets uploaded: the file is read on your own machine, so your newsletters and internal documents stay exactly where they already are.
About Microsoft Publisher
Microsoft Publisher arrived in 1991 as desktop publishing for people who were never going to buy PageMaker or QuarkXPress. Professional designers mocked it; meanwhile churches, schools, scout troops, clubs, and small businesses produced millions of newsletters, certificates, flyers, and menus with it — because it was cheap, it came with templates, and it was often already on the office PC. Its .pub format was always a dead end: Publisher itself was essentially the only mainstream application that could open a .pub file, and Publisher only ever existed on Windows. Now the dead end is official — Microsoft has announced Publisher’s retirement, with support ending in 2026 and the Microsoft 365 version ceasing to run altogether. The escape hatch is libmspub, a Document Liberation Project library reverse-engineered from the format, which is what LibreOffice uses to open .pub files. This tool runs libmspub in your browser, covering Publisher 97 through the 2016-era format used by the final releases.
Frequently asked questions
Does my newsletter get sent to your servers?
No — there are no servers involved in the conversion at all. A one-time ~1MB engine download runs in your browser via WebAssembly, reads the .pub file locally, and renders it on your screen. Once the page has loaded, it works with your internet switched off. Your original file is never uploaded and never altered.
Which Publisher versions can it open?
Files from Publisher 97 through the 2016-era format — which is also what the final releases up to Publisher 2021 save — open here. That covers essentially the whole life of the product. Layouts, text, and vector elements convert well; some intricate effects or unusually compressed embedded images may come through simplified, and password-protected files are not supported. Multi-page publications produce one SVG and one PNG per page.
What do I do with an SVG?
Treat it as the modern, portable version of your publication. Open it in any web browser to read it; edit it in Inkscape, which is completely free, or in Figma or Illustrator if you have them; or hand it to a print shop — SVG is true vector output, so it prints sharp at any size. The PNG download is the quick option when you just need to email a page or post it online.
Publisher support is ending — can I still open my .pub files after it’s gone?
Yes. Your .pub files don’t expire when Microsoft ends support in 2026 — they’re just files — but the Microsoft 365 version of Publisher will stop running, and there will be no official way to open them. This tool doesn’t depend on Publisher or on Microsoft at all, so it will keep opening .pub files afterward. That said, now is a sensible moment to convert anything you care about to SVG and PNG, so your archive is in formats every future application understands.