What to use instead of Publisher after it retires

Converting your old files is half the job. The other half is picking what you'll make next month's newsletter in. An honest tour of the replacements, by the kind of document you produce.

Microsoft's own suggestion is Word for documents and PowerPoint or Designer for visual layouts — and for a weekly bulletin that's mostly text in columns, modern Word genuinely covers it, especially starting from a converted .docx of your old template.

If your documents lean on layout — festival flyers, certificates, anything with precise positioning — the realistic candidates are Canva (browser-based, free tier, thousands of templates, the common choice for church socials already), Affinity Publisher (a one-time purchase with a familiar name; it can't open .pub files, but it opens a converted PDF with the text still editable), and LibreOffice Draw (free, and the only desktop program besides Publisher that can open a .pub file at all). Before you commit, rebuild one real document in the candidate — this week's flyer, one certificate — and you'll know within an hour whether it fits how you work.