I believe the original announcement said October 13, 2026.

Can Publisher export to a format that’s readable in Affinity and preserves all the text boxes and objects?

@Palestrina, I have not been able to discover a compatible format that does what you are asking. I've done one of two things: start from scratch or, open Affinity and Publusher side by side and copy and paste content from Publisher to Affinity. Depending on the project this is all I've been able to figure out. The issue with exporting Publisher as a PDFthen importing into affinity is every sing text character is its own object. I.e. ever sing letter and punctuation mark is its own text box.

Canva is fine for graphics imho. It’s not so good for anything else.

I've been gradually switching over to Canva and have been very happy with it. I actually think the quality of our worship aids has gone up. The downside is I usually take copies of worship aids with me to a new job so I can use them as templates but that's harder to do with Canva.

Canva Pro is also free for non-profits, fyi.

I've been using Word primarily since 2010. For what I need to use it for, it works great.

@StephenMatthew: that works for archival, but not for being able to re-use / edit previous material.

My vote would be for some sort of LaTeX-based system, given that you need that for gregorio anyway. I've been doing this long enough that I just write LaTeX by hand in a code editor, but I wonder if tools like Overleaf support the gregorio package?

For those making the migration away from publisher to something (anything) else, there are lessons to be learned from the sunset of Finale:

1.) backup your files if need be
2.) save them in universal formats if they exist. At a BARE MINIMUM, this means saving all your important documents as PDFs, since these are universally readable files. If there are export to rich text options, do both, because then you’ll know you have editable / copyable text.
3.) start the transition sooner than you think you need to; this whole process takes time, if not automated in some way. That is, just the process of opening and saving files in alternate formats takes time when you have many files. This is to say nothing of the time it will take to become similarly competent in another software.
4.) if you’re hell-bent on sticking with the outdated version, then you need to run it on a stable machine that is not connected to the internet.

I can tell you from first-hand experience with Camtasia, the old version might work for a while. A good long while. But one day, when you are least prepared, it will suddenly stop working all together, and you won’t even be able to go back in and save your files to an alternate format. In my case, my computer updated overnight, and it forked something in the system and my software couldn’t even boot anymore. Suddenly you have a deadline and the only tool you know to get the work done doesn’t work at all anymore. Don’t let that happen to you.

And a bit of parting advice: I implore you to not settle for just a word processor. You CAN do beautiful things in Word (I know multiple colleagues who do) but I promise you it’s more work than you think. Proper desktop publishing software is the way to go for bulletins and fancy worship aids. They are actually designed for this type of work, rather than merely permitting you to accomplish it with enough patience.

And a second bit of parting advice: don’t start a new Adobe subscription. You’ll very likely regret it if you’re not already ensconced in their ecosystem.

Quoth @ServiamScores:

if you’re hell-bent on sticking with the outdated version, then you need to run it on a stable machine that is not connected to the internet.

Why do you think I have so much old computer hardware lying around my house? (At least, that's what I keep telling myself, and also what I keep telling my wife!) At the same time, though, that's not really an option for most software published after about 2015 or so — once support drops, the software often won't run at all. (Case in point: Office:mac 2019.)