Evidently Microsoft Office 365 (a virtual program, operating online only) won’t open Publisher files after October 1st, 2026. And even if you have a standalone version installed on your computer (most recently sold in a 2021 package) it will open but won’t receive security patches after October 16, 2026–leaving you vulnerable to viruses.

After twenty five years of designing things I have 352 Publisher files so I did some research and experimentation to find the “best” solution to this bad situation. Here are my notes on converting Microsoft Publisher (.pub) files to other formats like Adobe (.pdf) and PowerPoint (.pptx) and sometimes even Libre Office “Draw” (.odg). The goal is to keep my designs editable for personal future use / modification.

First, there is no easy solution. Publisher does not have the ability to export or save as Powerpoint .pptx. Powerpoint does NOT have the ability to open or import either .pub or adobe .pdf. Inkscape cannot open .pub files nor import them. (It uses .svg files but not all .svg files are the same. Libre Office Draw can export .svg but you will notice when you open that file in Inkscape the designs are not editable, they are images.

Univik Pub Converter: I installed version 6.9 from the website https://univik.com/file/converter/pub.html This app is also in the MS Windows store but only version 6.7. I didn’t pay for it, only evaluated the free version.
– Don’t need Publisher installed in order to open .pub files
– Univik will continue to be able to open .pub files after October 2026.
– conversion to .svg did not yield an editable file
– conversion to .pptx was editable but poor graphics no matter the options I chose
– conversion couldn’t handle WordArt in the file–it simply removed it, replaced it with a blank space.
– It says it can do batch processing but I didn’t try it.
– Doesn’t use .PDF as an intermediary so you don’t need to have Adobe Acrobat Pro installed, but its options to generate a PDF (grayed out) require you upgrade to the paid version.
– it can open .pub files made in earlier versions of Publisher, including Publisher 1998.
– the free version can will only convert the first page in any file. Have to upgrade to convert a .pub file with multiple pages into .pptx with multiple slides.
– running it on a variety of my .pub files sometimes the output was perfectly editable but at other times it produced image files from nearby design elements, or just one big image for everything, neither of which were desirable.

PubBridge (from Microsoft store) Costs $9 for up to 1000 file conversions one-time fee. Single file or batch processing.
– Can open files made in earlier versions of Publisher but NOT Publisher 98. (And I am unsure of other early ones between 1998 and 2013)
– does automated conversion from .pub to .pdf based on native Microsoft Publisher ability to save as .pdf, but then it only can do .pdf to .pptx if you have acrobat pro (I do, by subscription $30 per month)
– PubBridge depends on the ability to run Publisher and use it to save to .pdf. It will cease to function October 2026 because Publisher will cease to function October 2026. It cannot run with just a PDF if you have that by some other means.
– If you have stored extra images or design elements / shapes outside the viewable area (for later use) or just happened to have saved the .pub file with an element hanging off the viewable page, these will not convert to Adobe .pdf and will not be visible on the slides in PowerPoint .pptx. Everything is cut off at the visible page edge. You have to edit the .pub file to add extra pages and move or rearrange appropriately and only then attempt conversion.
– If a font isn’t embedded in the .pub file and the upgrade to Windows 11 doesn’t have it installed, the conversion errors out. Have to first open the .pub file in publisher under Windows 11, see if it gives an error about not having that font. If it does give the font error, have to close it, go to the Advanced Font Viewer app I have, find the font and install it. Then go back and the same .pub file opens without a problem. Then it can be converted.
– files made in Publisher 98 error out, can’t be converted.
– It processed a lot of files correctly, including multiple pages in Publisher as multiple slides in Powerpoint, as well as a couple files with word art and borders horizontal and vertical. (Univik and Libre Office Draw failed on these elements.)
– On a complicated slide it made some circle and oval outlines extra dark, I had to fix it in PowerPoint after conversion.
– SIGNIFICANT PROBLEM (But there is a workaround) Early in my trialing of the software there was trouble with a flowchart diagram I made: in the lower left corner of the page the circle couldn’t be selected at all so it couldn’t be edited or deleted. Online advice was to create another shape to place in a layer over it then recreate the circle and its text on top of that. Not a good solution! On this troublesome file I also tried to manually go to the Adobe .pdf file (which looked correct) and save as PowerPoint .pptx but it had the same problems as the PubBridge automated export. So really its a problem with Adobe!!! (I put in a bug report to both PubBridge and Adobe.) Well, eventually I found the fix to the unselectability problem. Here it is:
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Instructions for bug fix:
In this conversion Adobe randomly sends design elements to the Master Slide background where they cannot be selected or edited or deleted unless you know to take it off the background of the master slide and transfer it to a regular slide. (It doesn’t matter whether it was grouped or ungrouped originally in Publisher.)
The workaround is three steps:
1). View…Slide Master
2). Then select the master slide in the top left location, right click on it and choose Format Background from its popup menu.
3). Then you can delete what is there or copy it to another location where those elements are editable when you close the slide master view and return to normal viewing.
4). Close by going back to View…Normal Slide
Note: From a normal view one can also click on the slide in the upper left, then look to the editing box over at the far right screen margin. When it says “Format Background” as a title there is then an option on its menu to check a box to Hide Background Graphics. But if you NEED those elements to appear elsewhere, hiding them doesn’t help!
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Libre Office Draw. (Open Office is defunct; that open source initiative continues now under Libre Office. “Draw” is its package equivalent of Publisher.) It can open publisher files without needing to have Publisher installed. It can edit them but not resave or export the result as .pub, and it can’t save or export to PowerPoint .pptx either. It has its own formats .odg, .fodg, and .otg But it can export to .pdf and graphics formats .gif, .jpg, and notably: SVG for Inkscape. But its .svg file isn’t editable, it comes into Inkscape as an image.
– libre office will continue to be able to open .pub files after October 2026.
– It screwed up the line spacing of a five-line text box within a larger polygon so that I had to fix it.
– It hid all the line endpoint arrows on the flowchart! I had to use a master view setting to reveal them all. But then with that setting active all the circles for the nodes had arrows, too. Say what! But these I could right click to select “Close Object” and the circles looked normal again. Just a pain to do it with every one.
– It cannot process word art or borders on a page in the original .pub file. (I didn’t try copy and paste between .pptx created by PubBridge, but that’s what I would try next if I had to make it work in a Libre Office Draw file. As it was, I was happy with how those elements converted in PubBridge.
– Libre Office Draw screwed up the alignment of various different text boxes with each other, but I learned to enhance the arrow keys’ functionality to fix this more easily: select the element then use arrow keys on keyboard to maneuver like so: use shift+arrow keys to make larger movements, use alt+arrow keys to make finer adjustments to position.
– Any polygon I drew myself from individual lines in the original .pub file is in DRAW now a nightmare of turning on and off endpoints that I haven’t yet figured out.
– Libre Office Draw can export to .svg (I thought to then use Inkscape) but it makes everything into a single image, not editable parts.
– If back in the .pub file you stored extra images or design elements / shapes outside the viewable area for later use, they WILL show and be editable in Libre Office Draw–most of the time. But at other times it completely misses some elements / shapes.

CONCLUSION:
– I will use both the PubBridge (paid platform level) and Libre Office Draw (free forever) solutions. (And I already am paying for Adobe Acrobat Pro for other reasons.) The first program I will run immediately in batches prior to October 1st, 2026. The latter program I will run when I need to edit an individual file after October 1st, 2026. I will only use Univik (free platform level) when PubBridge fails me.
– When PubBridge errors out on a missing font I will use Advanced Font Viewer to add it into Windows 11
– Need to open each and every .pub file to see if it has objects stored outside the page area or overlapping on/off. If so, must add pages to store them appropriately in the original .pub file or else the above programs could miss them.
– Starting in November, 2026 I might want to buy a standalone publisher in the Microsoft Office Pro 2021 version if I need to. (Not the 2024 or 2026 versions which are online only.) I hear you can have both the online and standalone versions at the same time but they have to be installed under different windows logins so as not to interfere with each other. (Just create a new profile for the computer login screen.)