Microsoft publisher reviews

You can publish in the most effective way for your audience. Send professional-quality emails, share pixel-perfect printouts and export to industry-standard, non-editable formats. Summary: Microsoft Publisher is a publishing software available with Microsoft subscription.

It is quite easy to use and efficient at publishing documents in any design or layout for professional use. Positive: Microsoft Publisher is a great piece of software which allows one to publish enterprise standard newsletters, brochures and booklets. It has the familiar ribbon interface and is quite simple to use after a while. It can be used to draft simple as well as complex layouts and can export them in a number of formats.

Negative: The only limitation is that it is available on Windows desktop only, no way to access it from web or mobile. Summary: Microsoft Publisher is basic and intuitive to edit page layouts. It offers the easiest way to design profession look for newsletters or posters. I highly recommend this if you are searching for the easiest and hassle-free designs. Positive: Microsoft Publisher is very easy to design tools.

It also offers great premade templates to select and make a more appealing design. Backup and instant share is very convenient. Summary: Overall it's easy to use and works well. It's like a simple version of Adobe Illustrator with most features. Positive: Works well if you need to design a flyer or any type of simple design for businesses or events. Pretty simple to use. News Business Software. Alternatives Claim this Product page.

There are pros and cons to the idea of renting your software monthly rather than owning a license to use it outright, but putting these aside, InDesign is the best desktop publishing application you can get right now.

Once, Serif was the maker of applications that were leagues behind the market leaders. Then came , and the release of Affinity Designer, the first program in what would become a software suite that challenges the market leaders for primacy. Affinity Publisher is part of a three-app package that includes the illustration app Designer and the photo editing app Photo - together, they make a professional-quality graphic design suite.

And unlike Creative Cloud, you only pay for these apps once rather than ranting them month-by-month. Publisher was the final app released, and ties the other two together in a clever way, as long as you've got them all installed.

Select an image in Publisher, then click on the Photo button at the top left, and you can edit the image using Affinity Photo's tools within the Publisher document - no more switching from InDesign to Photoshop and back, the Affinity suite merges all its tools into one to create something new and exciting in the desktop publishing world. Part of the Office suite of apps, but suffering from a lack of love by Microsoft, Publisher is the DTP app you may already own but have forgotten about.

It shares the same ribbon interface as its stablemates Word and Excel, and you'll be able to get straight down to business if you're familiar with the way those apps operate. Elsewhere though, it suffers from a lack of integration into the wider Office ecosystem, with a help system that's unintuitive and lacking the baked-in OneDrive support that's a major part of the Office approach to the cloud - there's no realtime collaboration on documents, for example, and no web or mobile apps.

Instead, Publisher fills an ever-narrowing niche between Word and something like InDesign. It's fine if you're producing leaflets or posters at home, but don't expect to see a national paper using it. If you're on a tight budget, or simply prefer not to pay for your software, then there's an excellent open-source desktop publishing solution in the form of Scribus. The app has been in development for almost 15 years, and uses a similar system of frames and layers to InDesign and Affinity Publisher.

You get professional features such as CMYK color support and commercial-quality PDF production, but you don't get much in the way of fonts and Pantone colors aren't supported.

You can use Scribus to create leaflets, books, posters, even full-blown magazines. There are also tools for making interactive forms and PDFs to post online. Scribus is one of the best desktop publishing programs out there, and a good addition to an open-source software collection.

An oddity in the world of the best desktop publishing software, Lucidpress is entirely browser-based. While you can use it for free, Lucidpress has a few restrictions that push you toward upgrading to its Pro version: only three pages per document, a maximum of 25MB of storage, and a resolution limit on exports of 72DPI.

If you can live with that, then fine, but it's not going to cut it for professionals. Beyond this, there are levels that unlock collaborative working and approval workflows.

Documents are stored online, and edited through a browser window. If you're looking for a way to get started in publishing, or just want to quickly design some documents, then Lucidpress is worth a look.

In our most recent evaluation, we spent over 50 hours comparing the capabilities and features of the programs above programs to determine which ones had the best layout, graphic design and typography tools. Programs that offered more tools typically scored better. We looked for features that made programs easier to use, including proportional snapping, master pages and the ability to import both Photoshop PSD and Microsoft Word files.

We favored programs that were compatible with other programs and made the designing process easier. We tallied up art assets available through each program to see which one provided the most. Since quantity isn't everything, we also checked to see if the designs offered were modern and stylish enough for professional and personal use. Programs with large quantities of beautiful graphics scored higher than software that offered large quantities of subpar art.

Similarly, while we counted the number of templates each program came with, we also looked to see if they were classy and suited for professional as well as informal occasions. Programs that adequately covered both categories scored higher in our comparison. Since type tools add a lot to overall creation, we looked for programs that offered everything from a spellchecker to kerning and tracking adjustments. There's a mix of tools from Word and Powerpoint here, and the interface can be customized to suit your needs.

Thanks to its mixture of templates and easily grasped tools - and things like Color Schemes, which make it easy to adjust all the colors in a document with a few clicks - it's simple for even new users to make something that looks great. Everything in Microsoft Publisher works via the ribbon menu. Professional features such as text running around artwork, or the use of Pantone and CMYK colors, are neatly integrated. And while it's certainly possible to create an image-rich document in Word, you'll have a better time in Publisher, and may end up with a better result too.

Publisher serves a niche for documents that are too complex for Word, but don't require their designer to sign up for an InDesign subscription. What's missing from Microsoft Publisher, but present in other Office apps, are things like mobile or web apps for viewing documents, or OneDrive collaboration between multiple users.

The program also seems to be outside of the integrated Office help system, saddled instead with an old-fashioned system that takes two clicks - one on the Help menu header, then a second Help button on the ribbon - to even access.

If you're a Microsoft Office subscriber, the chances are you've got Microsoft Publisher already. That's not to say it's a bad app, but only the most die-hard of Microsoft Office users would consider it over the competition.

As part of an Office subscription, Microsoft Publisher makes a lot more sense, but it remains a second-string program that's hard to find even on the Microsoft Office website.