Microsoft retires Publisher in October 2026 and nothing else opens .pub. Convert the newsletters, flyers and family cards to PDF while you’re thinking about it.
Publisher files are page layouts, not documents — text boxes pinned to positions. PDF preserves that faithfully. Every “.pub to Word” converter (including Microsoft’s own suggested route) produces something you’d have to rebuild by hand anyway; we’d rather not pretend otherwise.
Publisher 2000 and later convert well. Publisher 95–98 files are only partially supported by the libmspub filter — try it, but temper expectations for those two.
If you still have Publisher installed: batch-export your own PDFs while you can. If you don’t — that’s what this page is for.
It’s written to a private temporary folder for the few seconds the conversion engine needs, then deleted — nothing is retained, logged or shared. No account, no email, no “files kept for 24 hours” fine print. These are often someone’s letters, family records or old business files; we treat them accordingly.