Microsoft's guidance: convert your files before 1 October 2026. Microsoft's own published date, given here as context. Nothing on this page expires.

This is the most common real problem with the Publisher retirement, and it is not really a technical one. It is an arithmetic one. If a file takes a minute to open, export and close, then 200 files is over three hours and 2,000 files is a full working week. That is why "just save each one as a PDF" is sound advice that quietly stops being advice at all somewhere around the fiftieth file.

Step 0: count the files first

Before choosing a method, find out how big the job actually is. Open PowerShell and run:

Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\Shared" -Filter *.pub -Recurse -File | Measure-Object

The Count it prints is your real number. People are routinely out by a factor of five in both directions, and the answer changes which route is worth the effort. Under about thirty files, doing it by hand is genuinely quicker than setting anything up.

While you are there, it is worth listing them to a file so you have a checklist to reconcile against afterwards:

Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\Shared" -Filter *.pub -Recurse -File | Select-Object FullName, Length, LastWriteTime | Export-Csv pub-inventory.csv -NoTypeInformation

Step 1: Microsoft's free script — the right answer if you still have Publisher

Microsoft publishes a sample PowerShell script called Convert-PubFileToPDF.ps1, linked from its Publisher end-of-support guidance. It is free, it is first-party, and it handles the tedium properly.

The one hard prerequisite. Microsoft's own instruction is to ensure you have a working and licensed version of Publisher installed. This is the part people miss and it is not negotiable: the script does not read the .pub format itself. It opens Publisher through automation and asks Publisher to do each export. No Publisher on the machine means nothing for the script to drive.

Once you have downloaded it, the commands Microsoft documents are:

  • One file — Convert-PubFileToPDF.ps1 -Filter "C:\Documents\MyFile.pub"
  • Everything in the current folder — Convert-PubFileToPDF.ps1 -Filter "*.pub"
  • Current folder and everything beneath it — Convert-PubFileToPDF.ps1 -Filter "*.pub" -Recurse
  • A named folder and everything beneath it — Convert-PubFileToPDF.ps1 -Filter "C:\Documents\*.pub" -Recurse

The error that stops most people

If PowerShell refuses with a message about running scripts being disabled on this system, that is the execution policy doing its job — Windows blocks downloaded scripts by default, which is a good thing and not a bug.

The tidy fix is to unblock that one file and permit scripts for the current PowerShell window only, so nothing about the machine's security settings changes permanently:

Unblock-File -Path .\Convert-PubFileToPDF.ps1
Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process -ExecutionPolicy Bypass

The -Scope Process matters. It applies to that window and evaporates when you close it. If you are on a managed work machine, your IT policy may block even that, and the right move is to ask them rather than fight it.

The second common stumble is paths. Quote anything containing spaces, and use the full path rather than assuming which folder PowerShell started in.

It is fair to say this is not a two-minute job for someone who does not use PowerShell — people have described spending an afternoon on execution policies and paths before it ran. It is still, by a wide margin, the best free option if you have Publisher.

Two behaviours to know before you trust the output

  • It continues past errors. The script is designed to keep going if a file fails, which is sensible for a long unattended run — but it means "the script finished" does not mean "everything converted".
  • It will not overwrite. If a PDF of that name already exists it skips the file and reports the conflict rather than replacing your earlier output. Rename or move the old ones if you want a fresh run.

So reconcile afterwards. Count the PDFs and compare against the inventory you made in step 0:

(Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\Shared" -Filter *.pdf -Recurse -File | Measure-Object).Count

Any shortfall is your list of files needing a second look. Do not skip this — an unchecked bulk conversion is the easiest way to believe a job is done when a tenth of it is not.

Step 2: what PDF gives you, and what it quietly does not

PDF is the correct archival choice and we would not talk anyone out of it. It preserves the appearance of the page, it opens anywhere, and it will still open in twenty years.

What it does not give you is reusable material. Pulling the text back out of a PDF is imperfect, and getting a clean copy of the photograph that was on page three is fiddly at best. If your archive is purely a record — you need to be able to look at the 2011 newsletter, not remake it — then PDF alone is fine and you are finished.

If any of those documents contain material you will want to reuse — the logo, the photographs, the wording of a standing policy, the constitution printed in the back of the handbook — then convert to PDF and extract the raw content while you can. Doing both is far cheaper than wishing you had. There is more on that in getting the text and images out of a .pub.

Step 3: when there is no Publisher install to drive

This is the scenario the retirement creates, and it is the one Microsoft's script cannot help with: the files are on a share, the last machine with Publisher was replaced, and the subscription no longer offers it.

Your realistic options then are:

  1. Find or borrow a Publisher install. A colleague's older PC with a perpetual Publisher 2016 or 2019 on it is worth chasing down before anything else. If it exists, do the whole batch on it in one go.
  2. LibreOffice Draw with a script. LibreOffice is free and can be driven from the command line to convert files in batch. Import fidelity for complex Publisher documents varies, so test on a handful of representative files and look at the results before committing a whole archive to it.
  3. Upload to an online converter in bulk. Workable, but think carefully first: a whole organisational archive is exactly the kind of material that should not be posted to a third-party server, and it is likely to include personal data you are responsible for.
  4. A local tool that reads the .pub format directly. No Publisher required, no upload.

That last one is what we build. Publisher Rescue parses your .pub files on your own machine and gets the content out: text into a Word .docx plus RTF and plain text; the pictures stored in the file as standard image files, including WMF and EMF metafiles decompressed properly; a PDF of the recovered content ending in a notes page listing what could not be rebuilt; the page size and the number of pages actually rebuilt, which is the number of layout pages in that PDF rather than a claim about the original; the Publisher format family the file was saved in; and a report — in plain language and in JSON — of exactly what was and was not recovered per file. That JSON report is the piece that makes a large batch checkable rather than hopeful.

Honest scope. It recovers content, not page design. The .docx is text-faithful — your words come through reliably — but it is not a replica of the original page, and the words arrive as a plain flow: across the six genuine Publisher files this build has been run against, no character or paragraph format table could be decoded, so sizes, bold, italic and colour are not carried over and no font name was reported. The PDF is not a reproduction of your design either — fonts, sizes, bold/italic and colours are not reproduced, and WordArt, master-page artwork, colour schemes, shape fills and table cell layout are not rebuilt; the PDF states that on every page and lists what it left out on its own notes page. If a faithful-looking page is what you need, a PDF from Publisher itself is the better output and we will say so. Coverage is Publisher 2000–2019, and the tool names the format family a file was saved in rather than the exact release — Publisher 2002 through 2019 all write the same version marker. The Publisher 2000 path is in the build but no genuine Publisher 2000 file has been through it, and its older page-layout directory is not read; Publisher 97/98 and earlier are a different format and are reported as out of scope rather than mis-converted.

Your original is only ever read, never written to: the report records a SHA-256 checksum of the source taken before the scan and again afterwards, both printed in full so you can compare them yourself.

Supported operating systems: Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit), and macOS 10.15 or later on Intel and Apple silicon Macs. One purchase covers both — you get each download.

Saving the recovered files is what the £79 licence unlocks.

The short version

  1. Count the files. The number decides the method.
  2. If you have Publisher, use Microsoft's free script — it is the best free answer available.
  3. Reconcile the output count against the input count. Every time.
  4. PDF preserves the look; it does not preserve reusable text and images. Do both if you will ever need them.
  5. If Publisher has already gone, you need something that reads the format itself — and if the archive contains personal data, it should run on your own machine.