Microsoft Publisher converter
Open and convert Microsoft Publisher .pub files without Publisher: PDF for reading and printing, PNG or JPG for posting, with honest notes on what breaks.
.pub
Format
About Microsoft Publisher
PUB is the file Microsoft Publisher saves: a binary OLE compound file holding pages, positioned text frames, pictures, shapes, WordArt and master pages. It was the default tool for church bulletins, school and club newsletters, flyers, certificates and small-business brochures for three decades, which is why so many shared drives still hold folders of them. Publisher has no export to an open layout format, and Word, Google Docs, Pages and Canva cannot open a .pub file at all.
Microsoft ended support for Publisher in October 2026 and removed it from Microsoft 365, so the usual fix of asking a colleague with Publisher to export a PDF is disappearing. Our office engine reads .pub files from Publisher 2002 through Microsoft 365 and lays each page out the way the file describes it. Files from Publisher 2000 and earlier use an older internal structure that only yields bare text, so we refuse them with a message instead of returning a damaged copy.
The conversions that work are the fixed ones: PDF keeps the page size, pictures and selectable text, and PNG or JPG give one image per page. We do not offer Publisher to Word. A Publisher page is a canvas of loose frames rather than a flow of paragraphs, and in testing an editable export turned into hundreds of floating text boxes with nothing to edit in a normal way.
Single-frame designs such as certificates, cards, posters, information sheets and simple flyers came through closest to the original in our tests. Multi-column newsletters built from Publisher templates are the hard case: a story that continues through linked frames can repeat in every column or spill into the next article, and text no longer wraps around pictures. Open every converted page before you print a run or archive the originals.
Common Microsoft Publisher problems
Nobody in the office has Publisher any more and a .pub attachment will not open.
Use /convert/pub-to-pdf; the PDF opens on any computer or phone and keeps the text searchable.
A flyer has to go on the website or Facebook page.
Use /convert/pub-to-png for text-heavy designs or /convert/pub-to-jpg for photo-heavy ones, with max_pages 1 when only the front page is wanted.
The converted newsletter has text overlapping in the columns.
That is a linked-frame story being placed without reflow. If one page matters, export it from a copy of Publisher; otherwise retype that story in Word using the PDF as the guide.
The converter says the file is from Publisher 2000 or earlier.
Open it in any later Publisher, save it, and convert the new copy; the newer structure carries pictures and shapes the old one loses.
A whole folder of old newsletters needs to become PDFs.
Drop the files in together; each file is converted on its own and comes back as its own PDF, so one unreadable newsletter does not hold up the others.