Microsoft Office
The Microsoft Office suite (MSO) has some standout applications, e.g. Excel, which remains the best-in-class spreadsheet application. Yes, there are online free offerings that do spreadsheets. These online versions do not have the depth of features or stability of a locally installed version of Excel.
MS Excel comes with every version of MSO, including home and academic versions. All versions of MSO also include MS Word (word processing) and MS PowerPoint (slide presentations). However, certain titles, like MS Publisher (layout), only come with some versions of MSO. MS Publisher is similar to MS Word and MS PowerPoint, but is intended to be the preferred application of the MS Office suite for producing layout-driven projects, as opposed to presentation slides and text composition.
And thus, that’s the problem with MS Publisher – not everyone has it. To further complicate things, there’s no stripped-down equivalent of MS Publisher in any of the freely available online office applications.
The Situation
My wife and I do a fair amount of volunteer work for our Church, the schools, the kids’ sports teams, and tech groups in the area. I remember getting a brochure layout from the president of one of the tech groups I belong to (DACS.org), and thinking nothing of opening the MS Publisher file, which has a .pub filename extension. My machine has MSO 2010 Professional on it. Besides Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, this version of MSO also has Outlook (email), InfoPath (forms), MSO Tools, and Publisher. My wife’s computer only has MSO Home and Student – no MS Publisher in that version. She received a banquet program template to use for this year’s swim team banquet as a .pub file. My wife was trying to open it directly from her Yahoo! Mail by clicking on it, to no avail.
There’s a lot going on now with this workflow. One, I would never click on an attachment to open it from an email client. While it may be convenient, I just never trust any email client to handle the file the way I like, and I don’t really like that it opens the file in a downloaded temp directory, and so on. There’s just a lot wrong with that workflow, and a lot of trust in using a browser-based email system to somehow know how to handle files. I always download to a known location and, if not using the context menu (right mouse menu) to direct it specifically, I’ll click it and have the default file association provided by the operating system, not the web browser or email client, do the handling.
More than One Way to Skin a Cat
After trying for a while, my wife came to me for help. Once we successfully downloaded the file, we tried on her machine to import it into both Word and PowerPoint. No go. My wife is really good with MS Word and can use it to do some layout projects that for others would require PowerPoint or Publisher. I thought, well, there’s a PowerPoint viewer, why not a Publisher viewer? Nope. Microsoft’s solution for viewing a Publisher file is to download the trial version of MS Office and use Publisher to work with the file. After the trial period, Publisher will essentially turn into a viewer. Now, since my wife already had the MSO Home & Student version installed, I wasn’t going to risk corrupting that by installing a trial version over it.
The next step was trying to open the .pub file on my machine and exporting it as something she could work on using her machine. I was busy doing my own work and projects and she prefers her machine over mine, so we tried exporting it as a .mht file. This is an HTML file that contains all the binary image information encoded within it. When she loaded this file into MS Word, it lacked another page of the original .pub file layout and was missing some text information.
At this point, my wife’s frustration with this process was evident. I recommended a website I knew that a former DACS.org member, Rob Limbaugh, was fond of – Open Source Alternatives. It had two recommendations as alternatives for MS Publisher – OpenOffice Draw, and Scribus. She didn’t want to install another office suite onto her computer, so that was a non-starter. She also never heard of Scribus, so rejected that one as well. I had heard of Scribus. It is from a family of software known as DTP software, which besides MS Publisher, also includes Adobe Illustrator, PageMaker, InDesign, QuarkXpress, and others. I took a look, and it turned out that Scribus can directly import .pub files, using a newly refined library libmspub, initially developed during the 2012 Google Summer of Code.
We installed Scribus 1.5 on her system, which is the version that has this ability, and imported the .pub file, and she was able to use it to copy-and-paste the elements of the file into MS Word and continue on. She would have performed the edits in Scribus, but her deadline wouldn’t allow her the time, nor was she really inclined, to learn the software adequately.
More about Scribus
I installed Scribus on my computer and started taking a look. Scribus has been around since 2003, though I suspect some version of it existed prior to that. It is multi-platform. That means it can be installed on a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. The default Scribus file is a .sla file, which is based on XML. Scribus is designed to produce professional typesetting and layout, such as brochures, newspapers, posters, newsletters, and even books. When I investigated whether it could export into various other formats, I found the export, or Save As…, options pretty limited with most formats being variants of PDF. However, the software isn’t intended for format translation, so it’s really not a valid complaint, however much desired.
Scribus is free software and more about it can be found at its website. I would recommend Scribus if someone finds themselves suddenly responsible for a DTP project and not wanting to upgrade their MS Office edition or shell out for a commercial DTP software package. DTP professionals would probably still want to stick with their commercial DTP software-of-choice.
Updates
In the course of researching more for this article, I came across the information that LibreOffice can load .pub files, as well as Corel Draw X4.
References
- Scribus DTP Software Website – http://www.scribus.net
- Microsoft Office article on viewing Publisher files – https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Where-is-the-Publisher-viewer-a5a05230-654f-420e-8aa3-3b50f645c359
- Open Source Alternative Website – http://www.osalt.com
- List of DTP Software Titles – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_desktop_publishing_software
- Grid comparison of MSO Office 2010 Editions – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee523662%28v=office.14%29.aspx
- Grid comparison of MSO Office 365 Editions – http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/Compare-Office-suites/categoryID.68155000
- MS Publisher Office Website – https://products.office.com/en-us/publisher
- On LibreOffice working with MS Publisher files – https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#Filters, http://fridrich.blogspot.ch/2012/06/libreoffice-ms-publisher-import-filter.html, https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/give_me_my_drawing_back/