What to use instead of Publisher after it retires

Microsoft's own suggestion is Word for documents and PowerPoint or Designer for visual layouts — and for a weekly bulletin that's mostly text in columns, modern Word genuinely covers it, especially starting from a converted .docx of your old template.

If your documents lean on layout — festival flyers, certificates, anything with precise positioning — the realistic candidates are Canva (browser-based, free tier, hundreds of templates, the common choice for church socials already), Affinity Publisher (a one-time purchase with a familiar name but no .pub import), and LibreOffice Draw (free, and the same engine this site uses to read .pub files). The rest of this guide matches each tool to each kind of document an office actually makes.