It started with a phone call from my mom.
Microsoft had announced it was removing Publisher from Microsoft 365, and she, my aunt, and my cousin all had years of files made in it. Newsletters, wedding programs, labels, the family photo calendar we got every Christmas. She wanted to know if I could help them get their files out before the app went away.
I had not used Publisher in years. But I knew exactly what she meant, because I had used it for our own wedding program and thank-you cards. Publisher was the tool ordinary people used to make something that came out looking finished. And it was a tool you bought once.
The more I looked, the bigger the problem got. Church offices build the weekly bulletin from last week’s .pub file. Schools have years of newsletters and certificates. Nonprofits, small businesses, the volunteer who makes the monthly newsletter. The suggested replacements are good tools, but they are subscriptions, and none of them open the files people already have. Everyone was being told to start over.
So I started building.
First, save the files
The urgent problem was the archive. If Publisher was going away, people needed a way to turn years of .pub files into something they could always open.
The first thing I built was a converter: drop a whole folder of .pub files and get exact PDFs back, page for page. My family tried it the first day. My mom’s reply was “Oh hallelujah!”
That saved the past. It didn’t help with next week’s bulletin.
Then, keep editing
A PDF only saves what you’ve already made. The real question was why Publisher users should have to stop publishing at all.
So I built PubKeep, a desktop app for Windows and Mac that opens your .pub files and keeps them editable. The same text boxes, master pages, and fold-over booklets you already use, without Publisher on the computer. No converting first, and nothing to rebuild.
It’s a one-time purchase, not a subscription. You buy it once and it keeps working. And it saves to .pubk, an open format you can always get your work out of. After watching people lose access to their own work, I wasn’t going to build another lock-in.
The people who helped build it
Before launch, more than 1,100 organizations signed up for early access, most of them churches. They opened their own bulletins and newsletters, told us what was missing, and sent the files that didn’t come through right so we could fix them.
Some of what they wrote back has stuck with me. One church secretary said she got more done in 45 minutes than she had in other programs all week. An author told us she had thousands of Publisher files from 30 years of work, and that PubKeep was better than she had dared hope for.
Launch
PubKeep went on sale September 30, the day before Microsoft pulled Publisher from Microsoft 365, with a free 7-day trial.
What’s next
Support for the perpetual versions of Publisher ends October 13, so the next few weeks are about helping everyone who still depends on it. We keep widening what PubKeep opens, and the files people send us decide what we work on next.
If you or someone you know has a pile of .pub files, PubKeep is at pubkeep.com, and the free trial needs no card.
And if your mom calls about her Publisher files, now you know what to tell her.