Viewing Microsoft Publisher Files

I've had a few staff at work asking for Microsoft Publisher to be installed as they've been sent a file in Publisher's .pub format. Publisher is quite popular in schools as a page layout and design application as it's much less expensive than more industry standard tools like Adobe Pagemaker or Quark Xpress and it's actually quite good.

However, there are definitely problems when those users try to share their files with the rest of us as Microsoft haven't ever produced a viewer utility and neither has anyone else. So, other than asking whoever sent you the file to re-save it HTML, you're a bit stuck but there is another option - convert it to PDF, Adobe's Portable Document Format. That way you can at least view the file as it was meant to be seen, even if you can't easily edit it.

A couple of the services I mentioned in an earlier post on Free PDF Creation can read and convert .pub files to PDF…

• PDF Online - converts MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Publisher, MS Excel, HTML, Text, JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG, EMF and WMF files.
• PDF Converter - converts 58 file formats, including MS Office, MS Works, HTML, Lotus 123, JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG, EMF, WMF, SVG, Photoshop, AutoCAD and many more. There are some limitations ot the free service like a 30 minute delay between convertions and you can only convert up to seven files a month but it handles many file formats and can even reverse convert from PDF to MS Word or MS Excel.

If you only need to convert from Publisher occasionally, then using one of these can save an install, purchasing a license and a visit from your IT team.

Related Posts: Free PDF Creation