Real estate agents and property managers: flyers, listing sheets and HOA newsletters
A lot of agents built their listing flyer once, in Publisher, and then used it for ten years. New house, new photos, new price, same layout. The open house sign-in sheet, the "just sold" postcard and the HOA newsletter often came from the same place. It worked, so nobody changed it.
Then Microsoft removed Publisher from Microsoft 365 on 1 October 2026. If your office runs on Microsoft 365, the template that made every flyer no longer opens. The next listing still needs a flyer.
You don't need to rebuild your templates from scratch. You need two versions of each one: a file you can edit and a file you can send.
Word to edit, PDF to send
Convert your templates to Word. A converted Word file keeps the layout of the original. Text boxes stay where they were, pictures sit in their frames and tables stay tables. To make the next listing sheet, you open the Word file, swap the photos, change the address, price and room counts, and save a copy. It's the same job you did in Publisher, in a program you already have. We explain how the Word conversion works in Publisher to Word, without the picture-of-a-page trick.
Convert finished pieces to PDF. Buyers, sellers, lenders and print shops all open PDFs, on a phone or a computer, and the layout looks the same everywhere. If you have old flyers for sold listings that you keep for your records or your portfolio, PDF is the right format for those too. The text in our PDFs is real text, so you can search them later.
If a designer makes your marketing pieces, give them IDML. It opens in Adobe InDesign and Affinity Publisher with the pages still editable.
WordArt headlines and photo frames
Listing flyers were rarely plain. "Open house" bent in an arch across the top. "Just listed" in thick 3-D letters. A row of house photos, each one cropped into its own frame with a border. These are the parts of a .pub file that are hardest to bring across, and they're the parts people notice first.
We've done a lot of work on them. You can read about curved WordArt, clip art and picture frames in the hard parts of Publisher files, and about 3-D WordArt in WordArt gets its depth back. The short version: arched and 3-D WordArt keep their shape and their colors in the PDF.
Before you convert a whole folder, preview your most decorated flyer first. If the headline and the photo frames look right in the preview, the plainer files will too.
Photos and file size
Listing flyers are heavy on photos, and the photos are the point. Conversion keeps your pictures. In a PDF, only a very large image (over 64 megapixels) is scaled down, and a normal listing photo is far below that. In a Word file, a picture that appears many times, such as your logo on every page of an HOA newsletter, is stored once, so the file stays a sensible size.
If the photos in your original were low resolution, the converted file can't make them sharper. That is worth knowing before you send an old flyer to a printer.
Fonts and branding
Many brokerages have a house font. Word and IDML files keep the original font names from the .pub, so if the font is installed on your computer, Word or InDesign uses it and your flyer looks like your brand. If it isn't installed, the program picks a replacement and the letters may look a little different. Installing the font fixes that. In a PDF, when the original font is not available, a stand-in with the same letter widths is used, so lines break in the same place.
HOA newsletters and property manager files
Property managers tend to have more files: a newsletter each quarter for every community, notices about pool hours and parking, rules and forms. The same split applies. Past newsletters and notices go to PDF for the records. The newsletter template and the forms you fill in again go to Word.
You can convert up to 20 files and 2 GB in one job. For a big archive, the PubConvert app for Windows converts on your own PC with no job caps and nothing uploaded. On the website, files are deleted when the conversion or download finishes, and abandoned jobs are removed within one hour.
The preview is free, up to 100 pages and 25 MB per file, with 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.
Preview your listing flyer free and see how it comes out.