Originally published at: AppBITS: PubKeep Opens and Edits Orphaned Microsoft Publisher Files on the Mac - TidBITS
For 35 years, it has been a common refrain among Mac users who regularly interact with Windows users: “Sorry, I can’t open your Microsoft Publisher file. There’s no Publisher for Mac.” Microsoft first released its desktop publishing software for Windows in 1991 and then rolled it into Microsoft Office five years later. It was never a pro desktop publishing workhorse, as PageMaker (the precursor to Adobe InDesign) and QuarkXPress were in the 1990s, but for Office users who already had it on their PCs, it mostly did the trick. (To some degree, the word processor in AppleWorks (née ClarisWorks) and later Apple’s Pages met this basic need for Mac users.)
Nearly three years ago, Microsoft announced it would retire Microsoft Publisher in October 2026. Developer Adam Anderly, whose family’s printing business relied on the software for years, quickly built a converter to turn decades of Publisher documents into PDFs so their archive would remain accessible. He made PubKeep Converter available as a Web-based tool; convert up to three files for free or pay to convert larger batches.
Instead of stopping there, Anderly decided to develop a complete replacement application for Publisher, so his family members and others could keep publishing, not just look back at their past documents. The resulting software, PubKeep, is available as a desktop application for both macOS and Windows. Anderly says it “opens your existing .pub files from Publisher 2000 through Microsoft 365 and keeps them editable, with the ribbon, menus and tools where Publisher had them.”
For us Mac users, it’s the first time we’ve been able to open and work with Publisher documents in a native app that keeps their layouts intact. LibreOffice and Affinity can import .pub files, but they tend to reflow text and shift fonts. Here, for example, is the dinner menu from a friend’s restaurant back in 2008, when I was working on the restaurant’s website. PubKeep opened it without complaint.
As with opening any document someone sends you, you might not have the fonts used to design the original. PubKeep lists any missing fonts so you can track them down and install them. You can also swap in new fonts you already have, or you can accept PubKeep’s substitutions.
Serious designers already have and use Adobe InDesign, Affinity (see “Canva’s Affinity Combines Photo, Designer, and Publisher into One Free App,” 31 October 2025), or even—yes, it still exists!—QuarkXPress, and most other people are likely satisfied with Pages, Microsoft Word, or apps like Swift Publisher or iStudio Publisher. But if you or someone you know has a career’s worth of Microsoft Publisher documents, PubKeep makes them accessible on both macOS and Windows.
PubKeep is available for download as a native Mac application or from the Microsoft Store for Windows. It has a 7-day free trial and costs $149 for a single-user license.