Publisher retirement checklist for church offices

The bulletin template, the funeral order of service, the VBS certificate nobody can find the original of — a working checklist for getting a church office through the Publisher retirement calmly.

Most church offices have more Publisher files than anyone remembers making: weekly bulletins going back years, seasonal service sheets, certificates, name badges, the newsletter. You don't need to rescue all of them — you need to rescue the right ones, before the program that opens them goes away.

Start by searching every computer and the shared drive for *.pub and sorting by folder. The files fall into three piles: templates you still reuse (convert these to Word so you can keep editing), records you might need to reprint (PDF is enough), and everything else (leave it). Converting the first two piles is an afternoon's work for most offices; read each file's note and look only at the pages it flags. Do it while a copy of Publisher still runs somewhere in the building, so you can re-export anything you're unsure about from the original.