Cancellation of Microsoft Publisher

September 30, 2026 midnight was the deadline to use PowerShell script (on a Microsoft Blog) to automatically recurse though every subdirectory on your computer to find .PUB data files and, if they don't already exist, save them to the same subdirectory with the same filename but with filename extension .PDF (good for saving for reference purpose). On October 01, 2026, I discovered I could still manually open existing .PUB files with Publisher 365 App and save them with a new .PUB name (or .PDF name). On October 01, 2026, CoPilot says automated conversion from .PUB to .PDF via scripted automation has ended. CoPilot says that based on previous Microsoft product end-of-life behavior, in the next 2-to-8 weeks, Publisher users may continue to manually open and save user Publisher files (to .PDF). This, CoPilot says, is Phase 1 of Microsoft's End-of-Life transition. In Phase 2, user Publisher files can continue to opened as Read-Only ... meaning the Publisher application will not save your data files (in any file format). CoPilot says it cannot uncover the duration of the Phase 2 transition period. In Phase 3, CoPilot says Publisher application will not open user .PUB files. Then the transition will have ended.

On September 30, 2026 I ran across an advertisement wherein a third party seller was selling Publisher-LTSC for $155. In that case, the aforementioned automated script will still operate for automated conversion of a directory (and all subdirectories) worth of .PUB files to .PDF format files. Microsoft ends support for, but does not inhibit operation of permanent-license instances (like Publisher-LTSC) on October 13, 2026.

Although I was angry at CoPilot for wasting 20 minutes of my time, just before midnight, by creating PowerShell scripts that assumed ALL my .PUB files resided in only one directory, and hence I could not convert all my .PUB files by midnight September 30, 2026, I had converted most of them. PowerShell suggested ingesting .PUB files with LibreOffice Draw, but it wasn't worth my effort.

In your case, maybe you have close to 100 .PUB documents you can manually save to .PDF format in under four hours. Or if you have close to 999 .PUB documents, it will be worthwhile to purchase and install stand alone, permanent Publisher-LTSC, wherein you can proceed to convert at your leisure, but the script's elapsed operation time will be between half and four hours.

My successor to Publisher will be the free Affinity Studio Layout, which I downloaded after obtaining a free Canva personal user account (it's possible to work around having to purchase a pro Canva account requiring a credit card). Give yourself plenty of time to watch videos on Affinity, and don't watch any older than October 01, 2025, the date Affinity 2 (~$60) transitioned to the free Affinity 3. Once you have a free Canva personal user account, use of that account is necessary only once at initial installation of Affinity 3, which includes Affinity Studio Layout, which requires more study to operate than did Publisher. There is one other route for conversion. There exists (can't remember if on GitHub, or its name) an application that will convert .PUB to .IDML (In Design Markup Language) in beta version 0.3. Affinity Studio Layout will import .IDML files and save them as .AF format. I used it and it is effective at importing newsletter layout style meta data pretty well, but content-wise, where I had three articles in vertical columns on, say, pages, 1, 3, 4, it repeated Article 1 in all the three places, but the formatting was near flawless. The content of Articles 2 and 3 did not appear. However, other materials in the 8-page newsletter appeared to replicate very well.