What is stillPUB, and why did we build it?
stillPUB is a free tool that opens Microsoft Publisher files in a web browser and keeps them editable. We built it because many small organizations have years of newsletters, bulletins and flyers saved as .pub files, and Microsoft is ending Publisher. Microsoft's support article is titled "Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026", and stillpub.com cites it.
That is a real problem for a church office, a school, or a small shop with a print job every month. The files are not deleted. The risk is that the program that opens them goes away, and the day a printer asks for a change, nobody can make it. stillPUB is our answer to that.
What did we actually build?
We built a browser editor that reads .pub files, Word .docx files and PDFs, then lets you edit and export them. According to the stillPUB home page, it opens three file types, includes eight templates (among them a church bulletin and Avery 5160 labels), and exports PDF with embedded fonts, or JPG and PNG at up to 300 dpi.
It runs on your own computer. The home page says there is no account, no upload and no installation, and that it works offline after the first visit. For a business owner, that matters. A customer list used in a mail merge stays on your machine.
What happens to the files when Publisher goes away?
Nothing happens to the files themselves. The end-of-support guide says Microsoft began removing Publisher from Microsoft 365 on October 1, 2026, and that support for bought copies ended on October 13. A bought copy that is already installed keeps running, without updates or security fixes.
So the risk is not lost files. It is files nobody can open when a change is due. The guide lays out a plan that takes an afternoon, and there is a folder scanner guide for offices with a drive full of old files.
What cannot it do yet?
The .pub format is not documented, so some things do not come across cleanly. The compatibility guide opens with it: "A .pub file is not a documented format, so no reader can promise that every file will look or behave the same."
The guide lists where it falls short. Publisher's own table cell borders, fills, padding and vertical alignment are not recovered yet, so imported tables carry a warning. Imported decimal tab stops arrive as plain left stops. Some picture formats, such as EMF and TIFF, can need a placeholder or a conversion. The guide says the warning panel names the changes it knows about.
Version 1.0 arrived on October 16, according to the news page. It fixed bugs a small office would hit early: pressing Enter no longer moves formatting onto the wrong paragraph, and Zip Code + 4 values from Excel keep their dash and leading zero in a mail merge.
How do we know a file came across right?
We do not claim to. The folder scanner guide says a report with no detected warnings "still needs a visual check against Publisher or a reference PDF." The scan is read only: it does not change the Publisher files and does not upload them.
That is a rule we keep across our products. We say where the tool stops and a person has to look.
Can an AI agent run it?
Yes, on your own machine. The agents page says stillPUB ships a command line tool that doubles as an MCP server, with twenty-two tools for opening, editing and exporting. stillPUB has no AI of its own and no API keys. The agent is yours.
The same page is plain about the trade-off. An agent you connect can read what is in your documents, including names and addresses, and many agents are cloud services. If that matters for a file, keep it out of the agent's reach.
What did we keep, and what is the catch?
We kept it free, private and honest about limits. The stillPUB product page says there is no paid tier, and the app does its work in your browser, so there is no customer data on our side to lose or leak.
The catch is the one the compatibility guide states: a clean import is not proof of a perfect one, and the AI option sends text to whichever company runs your agent. If you are deciding whether a team that builds its own products can be trusted with yours, that is the test we would point to. We shipped something people need on a deadline we did not pick, and we wrote down what it cannot do yet.