A Publisher alternative for schools

What changes for your school

Schools have used Publisher for years: the newsletter home, classroom and hallway signs, concert and graduation programs, certificates and the PTA's flyers. Microsoft ended support for Publisher in October 2026 and is taking it out of Microsoft 365. Its notice to IT admins says the update that removes it reaches PCs from mid-November 2026, and some not until early December. And many teachers work on Chromebooks, where Publisher never ran at all.

The .pub files in your shared drives and teachers' folders are fine. They just need an app that opens them.

Open the files you already have

Open a .pub file in PubStudio and it comes in with its text, pictures, tables and pages where you left them, from Publisher 98 through Microsoft 365. Change it, print it, or save it as a PDF to email home. The original is never changed. See open a .pub file.

Weekly or monthly newsletter? With Pro, Design > Next Issue makes the next one for you. It moves the dates on, counts up the issue number and turns the calendar to the new month. It shows each change first, so you can untick any you'd rather make by hand.

Templates for school printing

• Newsletters for families, with a masthead, a lead story and a sidebar for dates. See newsletter templates.
• Flyers and posters for the book fair, picture day and PTA events. See flyer templates.
• Certificates of achievement, completion and appreciation. See certificate templates.
• Programs for concerts and graduation, printed as a folded booklet.
• Calendars, signs and labels: a month of events, a sign for the office door, file folder labels and name badges for open house.

Pro adds new designs every month. November's include a Winter Concert Program, a December Activity Calendar and a Year in Review Newsletter.

A certificate for every student

Mail merge makes one copy of a publication for each row of a list. Put a name field on a certificate, choose your class list from Excel or a CSV file, and print one for every student. It does address labels, letters home and name badges the same way. Mail merge is part of Pro: see the mail merge guide.

For school IT

• Chromebooks and Macs: PubStudio online runs in Chrome or Edge at web.pubstudioapp.com. There's nothing to install and no account to make, and the file is opened inside the browser, not uploaded.
• Windows PCs: install from the Microsoft Store, so Windows shows no warning and updates come through the Store.
• Locked-down PCs where staff can't install apps can use the online version too.
• Years of archives: Pro can convert a whole folder, and the folders inside it, to PDFs or Word in one go, on your own PC.
• Privacy: no account and no ads, and files stay on the computer they're opened on. See privacy.

Free or Pro?

Free, for good	Open, edit, print and save any publication, including your old .pub files, with one template of each kind. Prints and PDFs carry a "Made with PubStudio" line.
Pro, $10 a month or $99 a year	Clean prints and PDFs, mail merge, every template plus new designs each month, Next Issue, a Brand Kit for your school's logo, colors and fonts, QR codes, more export types, and converting a whole folder at once.

Every new PC gets a 7-day Pro trial, with no card or account. If you stop paying, PubStudio goes back to Free and every file still opens.

For a few classrooms or the whole front office, choose how many PCs at checkout, from 1 to 99. Each one is $10 a month or $99 a year, and a Pro license also works online, so it can go with a teacher to a Chromebook. If the school pays by invoice or purchase order, email us at [email protected] and we'll send you an invoice for the yearly plan. See pricing.