IT administrators: migrating a whole organisation off Publisher

Microsoft removed Publisher from Microsoft 365 on 1 October 2026. Support for the perpetual versions in Office 2021 and LTSC 2021 ends on 13 October 2026. Microsoft says installed perpetual copies keep working after that date, but they are no longer supported. For an IT team, that means the .pub files on your file shares now open on fewer machines every month, and the helpdesk tickets have started.

This post is a plan for an organisation of 50 to 500 users with a shared drive. It has four parts: find the files, decide what each folder becomes, convert, and tell staff what changed.

Step one: find the .pub files

You can't plan a migration without a list. On a single share, Windows Explorer search for *.pub works for a quick look. For a real inventory, PowerShell gives you a file you can sort and share:

Get-ChildItem -Path "\\fileserver\shared" -Filter *.pub -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
  Select-Object FullName, Length, LastWriteTime |
  Export-Csv -Path "C:\temp\pub_inventory.csv" -NoTypeInformation

Run it against each share and against redirected home folders if you use them. Open the CSV and group by folder. You'll usually find that a few departments own most of the files.

One thing to filter out: the .pub extension is also used for SSH public keys, such as id_rsa.pub. Those are small text files, often in .ssh folders. They are not Publisher documents and should stay as they are.

The LastWriteTime column is useful too. Files that nobody has changed in years are archive material. Files changed in the last year are probably live templates.

Step two: pick a format per folder

Deciding per file does not scale. Decide per folder, with the folder owner.

Archive folders get PDF. Old newsletters, past event material and finished reports should be readable by anyone, on any device, and look the way they were printed. Our PDFs contain real, selectable and searchable text, so they work with your search index and with document management systems that index text.

Folders of live templates get Word. Staff who made newsletters, flyers and forms in Publisher can keep editing them in Word, which they already have. A converted Word file keeps its text boxes, pictures and tables in place. More on that in Publisher to Word, without the picture-of-a-page trick.

If your marketing or design team uses InDesign or Affinity Publisher, their folders get IDML. If some users are on LibreOffice, ODG opens in LibreOffice Draw.

This matches Microsoft's own advice for the retirement: PDF for viewing, Word for editing.

Step three: convert

You have three routes. Pick the one that fits the size of the job and your data policy.

Microsoft offers a PowerShell script that bulk-converts .pub files to PDF. It uses Publisher to do the conversion, so it needs Publisher installed on the machine that runs it. It produces PDF only. If you still have a Publisher 2021 or LTSC machine, this is a reasonable route for the archive folders.

The website at pubconvert.com needs no Publisher installation. It produces PDF, Word, IDML and ODG. Each job takes up to 20 files and 2 GB. That suits a department that wants to convert its own folder, or a few hundred files spread over several sessions. Uploaded files are deleted when the conversion or download finishes, and abandoned jobs are removed within one hour. Full access is a one-time $49 for as many conversion jobs as you like, up to 20 files and 2 GB per job.

For a large share, the PubConvert app for Windows on the Microsoft Store is the better fit. It runs the same engine on your own PCs, converts thousands of files in one batch without the website's job caps, and uploads nothing. It produces PDF, Word, IDML and ODG. It is a separate one-time purchase from the Store ($48.99 in the US). If your data policy says documents can't leave the network, this is the route to use.

Whichever route you take, run a pilot first. Pick twenty files from different departments, including the hardest ones you can find: calendars, booklets, flyers with WordArt, files from the late 1990s. The engine reads files from Publisher 97, 98, 2000, 2002 and newer. Check the results with the people who made the files. They'll spot problems faster than anyone else.

Keep the .pub originals. Storage is cheap, and a file you can convert again later is worth more than one you deleted.

Step four: tell staff

Most of the tickets come from a short list of questions, so answer them before they're asked. A short message to all staff covers it. Say that Publisher is gone from Microsoft 365 and that the old .pub files have been converted and sit in the same folders, next to the originals. Say that archive files are now PDFs and open like any other PDF. Say that templates are now Word documents, and that new newsletters and flyers start from those. Explain that a font that looks wrong usually means the font is not installed on that PC: Word files keep the original font names, so installing the font fixes it. Finally, ask people who find a missed .pub file to tell IT where it is rather than email it around.

Then update your new-starter documentation and remove Publisher from your standard images when the last perpetual installs are retired.

Preview a file from your share free to see how it comes out before you plan the batch.