Microsoft Publisher alternatives for event programs in 2026

Microsoft is sunsetting Publisher in October 2026. If your association has produced its convention program in Publisher every year for the last decade, your team has a forced migration to plan — and the migration is also a chance to upgrade.

This page is about that upgrade: what it looks like to move from a static printed brochure produced in Publisher to a web-first program with optional PDF, and what you gain in the process.

What Publisher cost you (already, before sunset)

For two decades, Publisher hit a sweet spot for non-designers: more layout control than Word, less complexity than InDesign, integrated with Microsoft 365. An administrative coordinator could produce a 40-page convention brochure with sections, photos, sponsor logos and a fold-out schedule. That's why associations stuck with it.

The cost was always there, just normalized:

The program existed only as print. Attendees on their phones during the event had nothing to read. The brochure on the registration table was the program.
Every year was a layout rebuild. Returning speakers, perennial sponsors, recurring tracks lived as graphics on pages — not as records that carried forward.
Updates required republishing. A speaker drops out a week before the event and the printed brochures are already at the printer.
No attendee tools. Search, bookmarks, "what's happening now" — not on the menu when the program is paper.
Files trapped in a deprecated format. With Publisher sunset, .pub files are increasingly stranded.

What Evonli does instead

Drop your existing Publisher PDF — or the .pub file converted to PDF — into Iris, our AI editor. She reads it and extracts the structure: speakers with bios and headshots, sessions with day, time, room and track, sponsors with logos and tiers, vendors with booth numbers, the venue, the welcome letter, the closing message. You review, fix, accept, publish.

The output is two artifacts from one canonical source: a polished, mobile-first interactive program on its own public URL, and a printable PDF brochure for the registration table. Same content, two outputs. When something changes a week before the event, both update.

What that saves

Time. What takes Publisher weeks of layout work takes Evonli an afternoon of review.
Year-two time. Returning speakers, perennial sponsors and recurring tracks carry forward as records. Next year's edition is a review-and-update pass, not a rebuild.
Print AND web from one workflow. No separate Publisher file maintained alongside a website. The PDF you hand to your printer is generated from the same canonical content as the live web program.
Attendee tools at no extra cost. Search, mobile-friendly read, attendee concierge ("where is the keynote"), engagement metrics, post-event surveys — default features, not optional add-ons.
No file-format risk. Your event content lives in a database, not in a vendor-deprecated layout format.

What about the printed brochure?

Most associations don't want to abandon print entirely — there's still a stack of brochures on the registration table on Day 1, and a senior board that prefers paper. Evonli generates the printable PDF from the published program, so you keep the printed brochure without maintaining a separate Publisher file. Hand the PDF to your printer; pick it up the day before the event.

If Publisher feels like the path of least resistance for one more year

Publisher will keep running on existing installs after the 2026 sunset — Microsoft isn't pulling files off your hard drive. What you lose is updates, security patches, and the ability to install on new machines easily. For one more year of the way you've always done it, that may be acceptable. For the next decade of programs, it isn't, and the longer you wait the more painful the migration is.

See it on your own program