LibreOffice Draw Opens .pub Files After Microsoft Retires Publisher

LibreOffice responded by declaring support for the abandoned format. The organization said that .pub documents can now be opened with LibreOffice Draw. The development required the Document Liberation Project to reverse-engineer the .pub format, which is not an open standard and had only one fully compatible application before Microsoft retired it.

Italo Vignoli wrote, according to TechRadar, that as of the announcement, these documents are in a proprietary format, and the only fully compatible application for them has been abandoned by the very company that created it. Vignoli also criticized Microsoft for pushing users toward vendor lock-in, limiting their access to controls and forcing unwanted updates on them.

He urged organizations to examine their dependence on proprietary formats. "If you are responsible for documents in a public sector organisation, a school or an association, now is the time to check whether your file format is proprietary and dependent on a single vendor’s application," Vignoli said, stressing that such formats hand all access control to the vendor.

For users who have already lost access to Publisher through Microsoft 365, TechRadar reported that one recommended route is to bulk-convert .pub documents using a PowerShell script or another automation tool. Perpetual licenses such as Publisher 2021 do not remove the application from a user's machine, but its functionality is likely to degrade over time as bugs emerge and attackers find vulnerabilities to exploit.