The open source software ecosystem comes to the aid of users affected by the end of the life cycle Of Microsoft Publisherwhose farewell had already been announced last month.
At the same time as Patch Tuesday in October 2026, Microsoft made official the interruption of support for Windows 11 24H2 and Office LTSC 2021 (for which there are alternatives to get extended support), marking the end of perpetual support for the Publisher application.
Consequentially, Native “.pub” format files can no longer be opened or edited within the Publisher app. We remind you that they are available new open source clones of Office apps which can represent an important alternative for users.
What Microsoft recommends
There official recommendation initially provided by Microsoft was to convert documents to PDF before the end of September 2026. However, The Document Foundation (TDF) has highlighted how this solution, combined with the DOCX conversion alternative, is not optimal. The PDF format, in fact, is not designed for editing, while exporting complex page layouts to DOCX can generate serious formatting problems.
The LibreOffice alternative
The free and open source suite intervenes to solve the problem LibreOffice.
- Via the application LibreOfficeDrawusers can import Publisher files by leveraging the library libmspub;
- The library was developed by the Document Liberation Project through reverse-engineering operations on Microsoft’s proprietary PUB format.
- Opened and modified files can subsequently be saved in the standard, open format ODF (OpenDocument Format).
According to TDF, LibreOffice Draw currently represents the fastest way to open, view, edit and manage PUB fileslending itself perfectly to single-page documents or small multi-page dossiers such as newsletters.
Although the foundation makes it clear that Draw is not a complete, dedicated replacement for desktop publishing for those who use Publisher’s more advanced featuresthe application today constitutes an immediate and precious lifeboat for recovering and continuing to work on your PUB file archive.
