Feb 20, 2014 - You can open Publisher files on Mac using a conversion tool. It is considered an excellent resource for those who bemoan the fact that MS Publisher is not available on the Mac. As they say, you get what you pay for. Publisher for Mac Solution The power of Microsoft Publisher and more. Enrich text and images with state-of-the-art effects, import photos, and print to nearly any format.
Microsoft Publisher is an entry-level desktop publishing app, which is being developed by, the largest software development company. It is bit different from other apps of Microsoft Office package like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and so on. If you want to start a project, you might have to choose Microsoft Publisher where you will get maximum elasticity. However, it is not so much popular but sometime we need it very much to do a complex thing in an easy method. If you want to open those Publisher files what you have made in Office for Windows, you cannot do so with Office for Mac.
On the other end, there is no other software on Apple App Store for opening Microsoft Publisher file on. Therefore, obviously, it’s time to fall in trouble. Nevertheless, if you use this tiny trick, you can open any Microsoft Publisher file on Mac OS X after converting it into.pdf. Even if you want to use Office for Mac, you have to do two things.
You have to convert it in Word file and 2. You have to spend at least $139.99 to buy Office for mac (Home & Student version). However, in my trick, which will convert your Microsoft Publisher file in.pdf, you don’t have to spend even a cent since there are tons of online tools to do the same. Today, I am going to introduce one of them. How to open Microsoft publisher file on Mac OS X? As said above, at first, you have to convert it into.pdf and then it will become very easy to open such a file. Here is a cloud-based app, which is called Publisher to PDF.
You can use it without facing any problem and it is absolutely free. Just go to the homepage of and upload your Publisher file.
Then enter your email ID where you will get confirmation and download link. It requires only few minutes to complete entire process. Feel Free to share your thoughts in the comment section below. Don't forget to follow us on, like our and Add us to your circles on to keep you updated with the latest technology news, gadget reviews, launches around the world and much more.
MS publisher is a trap. There are about 9 file formats and they are not interchangeable. Once your data is in a pub file, it never sees the light of day except in publisher. Publisher is an illustration of how a home user, unprotected by the muscle of fortune 500 IT gets treated by Microsoft.
Incompatible file formats that change every six months. No backward compatability. In short, don't go there. Get your data out somehow and bust the extra gut work to make your newsletter in word, open office writer or stone knives and bearskins but get your data out of publisher while you can. For example, we had a community newsletter in publsher 2000 format. Somebody opened it in a newer version and it was forever converted.
No permission. Then one of our collaborators lost their CD. To get back in the game, they would have to write a hefty $300 check to Microsoft for something they already owned. Enough was enough and we converted the project to MS word and never looked back.
As for using Publisher under crossover, check the compatability list on their site. They do support quite a bit of software but Crossover is not free. As a last resort you could put.
Windows on your Mac using parallels or boot camp and get to your publisher data that way. Frankly, I recommend crayons on cardboard over publisher until or unless Microsoft opens up their file formats. I found an OS X publisher called. At $44.95 it costs less than a license for Crossover to run your existing MS publisher program. Download it and try it to see if it does what you need.
It exports to pdf but probably has its own proprietary file format. At least it's a mere fraction of the cost of publisher and is an OSX application. I also found a free open source cross platform publisher program called Scribus. Scribus is one of those open source things that requires you to install a half dozen things to get one thing working. Too geeky and too cluttered. I'll find an OSX solution properly distributed with a Mac mindset and update this post.
For now, skip Scribus. What do these 2 programs have in common? They don't import pub files because M$ has your data locked up in their vault.
You wrote it. You laid it out.
But you can't take your data with you when you leave publisher. You owe it to yourself to look around for alternatives to publisher.
I went over to Crossover (Codeweavers.com) and found that Publisher 2000 is the best supported version and gets 'bronze' which means it probably doesn't work well enough to get real work done. So now you must either 1) keep a windows box around 2) run parallels or boot camp to use publisher on your mac or 3) switch to another program. I'm pulling for option 3. I thought one of Pages strengths over Word is in publishing.
It may not be a complete replacement for Publisher, but should probably be enough for casual uses. Pages is part of the Apple's iWork suite a trial of which should be on your Mac or can be downloaded online. The new Word in Office 2008 for Mac also includes a publishing mode, which was Microsoft's way of trying to include some Publisher functionality on Mac without actually porting Publisher. I don't believe it can actually open Publisher files though so if you don't already have Office 2008, you should try the iWork trial or something else first. Click to expand.Very impressive brochure, DamienThorn! How did you manage the page placement? Did you manually drag pages around so the cover backed up with page 1 and the back cover backed up with page 16?
I looked at the help file for Swift Publisher and it offers the ability to automatically lay out a booklet. I think this is one of the big selling points of MS Publisher as well. It's not such a big deal to me as I simply drag the pages around to the order I want and then export to a pdf from word or pages and send the pdf to kinkos for printing. I also looked at Scribus in more detail. Like many open source programs, they don't care if you are put off by a perplexing array of downloads. It turns out there are really only two things you need, not 2 dozen as the site would make it appear.
There is a tar.gz file which presumably contains a.app file and there is ghostscript. I will download and try Scribus.
I'm particularly interested in Scribus as it has a Windows version and offers me a way to collaborate with Windows users. Click to expand.$29 is certainly better than what I've seen. Not bad at all. I don't really count pdf as a true export format because pdf is more like a printer ready format.
It isn't intended for extensive editing. Tweaking maybe, but not editing. For me, a program is 'open' if it can share files with its competitors. Word, Openoffice writer and Pages can all open doc files.
For low cost, I would recommend Scribus which is free but the install procedure is not one-click or click-and-drag like most of us are used to. To use Scribus, you must also install Ghostscript. You will have to create your document over again in Scribus, Quark or any other DTP tool you choose. In all fairness, I should mention the same would be true if you were going from any one of these programs to MS Publisher. Start with Scribus because it's free.
Alternatively you can use Office 2008 on Mac (which should also have fairly decent academic pricing) but there is no MS Publisher for Mac right now. Lastly, there is the shareware Swift Publisher which you can try for free. I would start with Scribus and Swift Publisher. Of course there is always the option to run Windows under Parallels so you can use your existing copy of MS Publisher but Parallels is not free.
Very impressive brochure, DamienThorn! How did you manage the page placement? Did you manually drag pages around so the cover backed up with page 1 and the back cover backed up with page 16?
I looked at the help file for Swift Publisher and it offers the ability to automatically lay out a booklet. I think this is one of the big selling points of MS Publisher as well.
It's not such a big deal to me as I simply drag the pages around to the order I want and then export to a pdf from word or pages and send the pdf to kinkos for printing. I also looked at Scribus in more detail. Like many open source programs, they don't care if you are put off by a perplexing array of downloads. It turns out there are really only two things you need, not 2 dozen as the site would make it appear. There is a tar.gz file which presumably contains a.app file and there is ghostscript. I will download and try Scribus.
I'm particularly interested in Scribus as it has a Windows version and offers me a way to collaborate with Windows users. Click to expand.I found a little plugin (can't recall it's name at the moment) that ultimately arranged the pages as they needed to be arranged when it came time for printing. Pretty well everything that's in the brochure was right out a template that is in Office 2008 - it was a lot faster, and much more powerful, than Pages (which I figured I'd try for the project.
My verdict: unimpressed with the lack of power. That said, if I HAD to use Pages, I probably wouldn't kill myself, just annoy people around me as I used it.grin.).