Serif makes a very capable alternative also called Publisher. I really like their software - you can buy it without a subscription and it's very polished.
It’s been a year, it’s still great. I already wasn’t sure they would survive before the acquisition, so the move doesn’t make that much of a difference in terms of stability.
Never heard of this company but the website makes these products look very mature. How does it compare to Adobe?
It would be great to see someone like this make an alternative to Office as well. I’d be glad to pay. I know some open source options exist but they always feel behind the times to me compared to Office.
I use their products daily both professionally and personally, mostly Designer and Publisher. Coming from someone who also used to use Adobe products, the affinity suite meets my needs almost perfectly. There are some times when I sorely miss a feature, like bitmap tracing and proper vector brushes in Designer and variable spread sizes in Publisher. That said, if you're going to pay for software, they're 100% worth the price.
Affinity’s stuff is freaking fantastic. I’m not a professional graphic designer but I spend enough time in such apps to want to have nice ones. Adobe’s apps are insanely expensive for occasional use. Affinity is very affordable, with the main complaint I’ve heard being that they aren’t identical clones of Creative Suite.
I have used Affinity photo and it is a really powerful alternative to photoshop. Have not used any other products but have been very impressed with Affinity photo.
I massively prefer it to Adobe. Granted I’m not a professional designer, but as an amateur affinity is much more affordable, but also much easier to work with.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Microsoft Publisher. Back in 1997 I was regularly using Microsoft Publisher for my primary school assignments. As soon as I realised that you could use it to create webpages, I was hooked! I was a bit too young at that point to understand coding things by hand, but with Publisher I could dive right in. And I haven't stopped since!
I started with PageStream on the Amiga then later went to Publisher on the PC; I used both of them heaps, primarily for print - got myself a HP LaserJet 4P which was just glorious. Did club newsletters, school works / assignments, cafe menus, everything. Great times.
I actually bought the boxed edition of PageStream with my paper boy money, even though I was just a high school student at the time. That's how much into it I was. :-)
(The skillsets picked up from this along with Assembly on the Amiga transitioned reasonably well into a career of web development and software engineering.)
I wonder when exactly Microsoft dropped mask and actively decided to fuck over paying customers on the regular. They have zero respect for their users.
Including desktop development, as one ex-advocate for WinRT, which I considered to be what .NET 1.0 should have been in first place, given the original idea of COM+ Runtime vNext, they really messed up the whole development story multiple times, always demanding a rewrite as if that is a minor issue.
However, nowadays, run away from anything that resembles WinRT tooling, keep to tried and true Win32, Forms, WPF, and even MFC, or plain Web, versus anything that builds on top of WinRT, unless the desired API is only available via WinRT.
It was obvious from day one that this would be a failure since it was strongly tied to the Metro UI (awesome on mobile, ugly as hell on desktop) and the Windows app store, all only available on an OS that never was competitive against its predecessor. Also it shipped with a .net implementation that was incompatible with the real one. I'm glad I skipped that tech entirely.
It evolved over time, by the time Project Reunion was announced in 2020, it had gotten kind of ok.
However, that incompatibility you point out, was present throughout all iterations.
Window 8 => 8.1 => 10 required rewrites, UWP/WinUI 2.0 => Win32/WinUI 3.0 dropped .NET Native and .NET 9 still isn't full AOT, C++/CX => C++/WinRT lost Visual Studio tooling and is nowadays in maintenance mode, yet gets sold as being the way for C++ devs.
Meanwhile, most of the faces on community meetings have changed since Windows 8 days, nowadays most seem fresh out of university without any Windows developer experience given the blank stares when questioned about feature XYZ becoming available, and bugs?, you only have to spend sometime digging around the Github repos.
Naturally, even the strongest advocate eventually gives up.
The hammer says "you need to update" as you pick it up, "downloads" an update (bonus: it fails for no reason) and when it does succeed, it turns to a pair of scissors, but you can get the hammer functionality with a subscription to "Scissors Pro Max, Enterprise Edition".
To be fair, if a hammer is sitting unused in a toolbox for 10 years, you might find it does "need an update", as the handle might have dried out and rotted, needing replacement.
Woodworkers and machinists probably spend as much time on tool upkeep as programmers do futzing with updates, new plug-ins, etc.
> To be fair, if a hammer is sitting unused in a toolbox for 10 years, you might find it does "need an update", as the handle might have dried out and rotted, needing replacement.
And hey the only place left to get hammers sells 50 brands of identical, low quality hammers (all clearly made in the same factory) under a variety of inscrutable, all-caps brand names like AOXIUN and KUDUO.
So actually maybe the advice for hammers and software is the same ... if you rely on it, make sure you can build it yourself.
I'm not sure if it's accurate, but a certain nautical themed torrent directory currently lists Office 2016 as the third most popular Application torrent.
Not surprised. Office 2016 is basically the "last" version of Microsoft Office. All the O365 stuff is pretty much regressive feature simplification over the top of it and in some cases abhorrent user hostile garbage (new outlook).
O365 pretty much killed Office for us. We barely use it in house now. At best it's hosted email. We don't even use the calendar / contact stuff as it doesn't sync with any phones properly. Apple won there by a mile. If only they did an enterprise iCloud+ with custom domain we'd just stop paying for O365 I suspect other than for a couple of Excel die hards.
There's still Office LTSC version, which will likely exist for the foreseeable future. I believe they require internet for activation, and are offline afterwards.
Yeah the canonical "offline" method is to use the LTSC images and activator from https://massgrave.dev/ . That's the only way to run a licensed copy of office on an airgapped network.
"X was the last version with any features" is among the laziest of internet tropes.
It's fine to say that you don't like the subscription model, or the pricing, or telemetry, or "AI" thrown in everywhere, but saying that everything is "regressive feature simplification" is so obviously wrong and so easy to prove false that you're basically lying to our faces and pretending people won't notice.
You can program Excel functions in JavaScript, greatly improving the power of things you can do (especially in the web UI). Excel haa gained SVG support, all sorts of improved functions (CONCAT, TEXTJOIN, SWITCH), funnel graphs, a dark theme, better Pivot Tables, viable coauthoring (even with Sharepoint or OneDrive, coauth on Excel 2016 was rough) and so much more. That's just one app.
It's fine to say "I don't find this a good value" or "change X is a dealbreaker for me" but please don't degrade the conversation by telling obvious lies.
It funnels you down the cloud route pretty heavily which is at least in what we do is incredibly dangerous and leads to regulatory problems. What we end up with is a nightmare tangle of GPOs where we don't know what feature is going to be turned on next in a trivial update which will end up with our mandatory signed in O365, because that's how you have to pay for it, pushing content to OneDrive or something. Even the file save dialogs switched a while back to push cloud first and we had a nightmare even though OneDrive was disabled (!) because no one could use it suddenly.
THAT is a complete dealbreaker.
As mentioned, the calendar and contact management is so bad that we ended up using iCloud anyway for that.
There's also a better win for us which is moving to R with tidyverse. Less footguns, can work with people via a VCS fine, can wrap a whole data pipeline in automation in a makefile, doesn't go down for 2-3 days a year.
What's the point of coy language like this? This is a general pattern I've noticed of people using weasel words because they think it will protect them from liability. Stop this pretence that saying "thepiratebay" is going to get you in trouble. It won't. This is a forum for adults, so let's talk like adults without bringing euphemisms and self-censorship in here.
Unless you were doing it to seem humorous, in which case go ahead. I didn't find it humorous but humour is subjective.
Its a interesting pattern in which people self censor due to other sites they use which will filter posts based on things like the Piratebay. Its some thing I've seen alot more in Gen Z users almost becoming slang.
I used this for all kinds of school projects and stuff back in the 90s. I even used it to make birthday cards because it had a handy template to print out in a way that you would fold in four to make the card. It was my first exposure to "word art" which still holds a strange fascination. Every once in a while I'd wonder whatever happened to it. I guess now I know.
Libreoffice Draw is an often overlooked application that I've been using for years to create one-page/two-page designed documents. It has become quite powerful over the years.
Also, you might want to have a look at the open source "Scribus". I never liked it too much, but it gets a lot of jobs done.
Scribus and Indesign are for professionals. MS Publisher is not.
Yes, Scribus could do anything Publisher can as it provides a superset of features compared to the latter.
But I think it would be confusing for people that don't understand color profiles, offset press and all the relevant stuff professionals care about. The bells and whistles are there for a reason.
If you have a Mac (or an iThing), Apple Pages offers a "Page layout" mode (distinct from "Word Processing" mode) that includes a bunch of nicely designed templates.
I used Publisher to edit the local scouting magazine about 15/20 years ago. I inherited that from the previous guy. It's one of the few Microsoft products that I actually enjoyed using: I felt it worked pretty well.
Eventually I migrated to Scribus, because I could use that from my FreeBSD desktop. I'm cool like that.
> Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher
Ugh ... Local desktop software mostly just keeps working, even old versions (we used a pretty old Publisher version, as we had a license for that). I know there's a year and a half of lead-time, but lots of smaller publications that are already on Publisher and work fine now need to migrate. Great.
And Word and PowerPoint have a completely different workflow; IMHO it's not really a replacement. It's like deprecating Vim and telling everyone Emacs is the replacement. Like, no: yes, it can do everything Vim can, but it's completely different (even with the "Vim mode" plugin things).
Sad to see classic Microsoft applications that are actually loved shut down, only to be replaced by things like Windows 11, that are made to be maximally invasive and anti-user.
I don’t think it was meaningfully updated for years. And now that web browsers grown to the point we have apps like draw.io or figma, I think it s was the right choice
Nah, Microsoft makes good money from Visio licenses - I'm sure it more than pays for itself and helps keep the megacorps locked in. All of our org's corporate laptops come with Office but you can request Visio if you need it - the license cost gets charged back to your department.
The mentioned alternatives also don't compare to what Visio has in terms of breadth for iconography, etc. It's just a bit better, which may not always be the case. That said, MS is definitely making enough to keep that ball rolling in terms of development.
I thought the point of office was to be paid tools for professionals? I last used publisher a week ago. Instead of software it seems they just want to push ads and AI slop. Shameful.
> I thought the point of office was to be paid tools for professionals?
Desktop publishing professionals don’t use Publisher - nowadays mostly they use Adobe InDesign, 20 years ago it was mainly QuarkXpress. Also Adobe FrameMaker - InDesign is more heavily used for consumer-facing output such as magazines and brochures, FrameMaker more for technical documentation
Microsoft Publisher was always a tool targeted at home users, small businesses-even if some of its users were “professionals” in other contexts it was never a professional tool
> Professional as in paid tools, not desktop publishing businesses.
What I’m calling “professional” tools (so not Publisher) aren’t only used by desktop publishing businesses. Only time I’ve ever been professionally involved in desktop publishing, was when I worked for a university - they used QuarkXpress for official university publications, such as the annual course catalog. I wrote a web-based database to store the course catalog (somewhat unusual tech stack of Apache+PHP on Solaris SPARC talking to MSSQL on Windows - we had our reasons) - staff would use its admin interface to CRUD course descriptions, which would then be published to the university website in HTML, and exported to QuarkXpress for printed publication. Originally I tried exporting it as XML but found QuarkXpress XML import feature too buggy, had much more success generating Quark’s proprietary XTG (aka XPress Tags) format (which looks a bit like HTML/XML/SGML but isn’t any of them)
I only used it for hobbies and school projects but I think I moved from Publisher to InDesign about 20 years ago. FrameMaker seemed too complicated and never really understood it. I typeset my wife's PhD thesis in Latex which so painful that I did mine in MS Word.
I still hold a grudge against Adobe for killing the Mac version of FrameMaker and not releasing an OS X version. I used it for everything. It was even decent as an editor. In comparison, MS Publisher seemed like a toy program.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher