Schools and PTAs: what to do with years of Publisher newsletters
Every school office has the folder. It sits on the shared drive under a name like "Newsletters" or "PTA stuff". Inside are years of monthly newsletters, the spring fair flyer, the book fair poster, the lunch menu calendar and a few yearbook pages someone made in 2014. Almost all of it is in Publisher's .pub format.
Microsoft removed Publisher from Microsoft 365 on 1 October 2026. If your school runs on Microsoft 365, those files no longer open on the office computer. The person who made most of them may have left years ago. You still need the files.
The good news is that you don't have to decide what to do with each file one by one. Most school folders split into two groups, and each group gets one format.
Two kinds of files, two formats
The first group is the archive. Last year's newsletters, old event flyers, finished yearbook pages. Nobody will edit them again, but people will want to look at them. A parent asks for the March newsletter. The principal wants a photo of the 2019 science fair. These files should become PDFs. A PDF opens on any phone, tablet or computer. It keeps the layout exactly as it was printed, and the text in our PDFs is real text, so you can search a folder of old newsletters for a name or a date.
The second group is the files you still use. The newsletter template that gets a new date every month. The welcome letter that goes home each September. The bake sale flyer that only needs a new day and a new price. These should become Word documents. Word is already on the school computers, most volunteers know it, and a converted file keeps its text boxes, pictures and tables in place so you change the words, not rebuild the page. We wrote more about how that works in Publisher to Word, without the picture-of-a-page trick.
If someone on your team designs the yearbook in InDesign or Affinity Publisher, convert those pages to IDML instead. If your school uses LibreOffice, ODG opens in LibreOffice Draw.
Converting the whole folder
You can convert up to 20 files and 2 GB in one job. For a school folder, that usually means working through it a year or a term at a time. We walk through a larger version of this in how to batch convert hundreds of Publisher files. For a school, the short version is this:
- Copy the folder off the shared drive to your own computer, so you work on a copy and the originals stay untouched.
- Sort it into two subfolders: "archive" and "still in use".
- Preview one or two files from each subfolder free on pubconvert.com. Pick the ones that look hardest: the calendar with every cell filled in, the flyer with the curved headline.
- Convert the "archive" folder to PDF, 20 files at a time.
- Convert the "still in use" folder to Word.
- Put the results back on the shared drive next to the originals, and keep the .pub files too.
Keeping the originals costs almost nothing in storage. If a converted file has a problem you notice a year from now, you can convert the original again.
Things to check before you call it done
Open a few of the converted files and look at them the way a parent would. Calendars and lunch menus are tables, and tables are where a small mistake shows. We spent a lot of time on those, and wrote about it in calendar cells, done right. Check that each day's text sits in its own box.
Look at the fonts. Word files keep the original font names from the .pub. If the school computer has the font, Word uses it. If it doesn't, Word picks a replacement, and the letters may look a little different. PDFs use a stand-in with the same letter widths when the original font is not available, so lines break in the same place as before.
Look at the photos. Class photos and event pictures should be in the same place and the same size as in the original.
Student photos and privacy
School newsletters often have children's names and photos in them, so it's fair to ask where the files go. Files you upload are deleted when the conversion or download finishes, and abandoned jobs are removed within one hour. We don't keep copies.
If your district would rather nothing leaves the building, the PubConvert app for Windows runs the same engine on your own PC and uploads nothing. It makes PDF, Word, IDML and ODG files and does not have the website's 20-file job limit, which also helps when the folder holds a decade of newsletters.
What it costs
The preview is free, up to 100 pages and 25 MB per file, with a watermark and no account. Full access is a one-time $49 for as many conversion jobs as you like, up to 20 files and 2 GB per job. There is no subscription to renew, which matters when the PTA treasurer changes every year.
Make it the last time anyone has to do this
Once the folder is converted, write a short note and save it in the same place: which subfolder is the archive, which files are the templates, and that new newsletters now get made in Word or whatever tool your school picked. The next volunteer will thank you.
Preview one of your newsletters free to see how it comes out.