MS Publisher for Mac

I really love Microsoft Publisher on my Windows system for putting out a community newspaper--it's simple, easy and powerful enough for my needs.
There is no Mac version. I think one can do this kind of thing in Word but I want to know if there is a Mac equivalent program that is easy but with some power.
thanks

 

no ideas? there must be something.

 

You could always use the windows version via crossover or boot camp.

 

MS publisher is a trap. There are about 9 file formats and they are not interchangeable. Once your data is in a pub file, it never sees the light of day except in publisher. Publisher is an illustration of how a home user, unprotected by the muscle of fortune 500 IT gets treated by Microsoft. Incompatible file formats that change every six months. No backward compatability. In short, don't go there. Get your data out somehow and bust the extra gut work to make your newsletter in word, open office writer or stone knives and bearskins but get your data out of publisher while you can.

For example, we had a community newsletter in publsher 2000 format. Somebody opened it in a newer version and it was forever converted. No permission. No warning. Just gone.

Then one of our collaborators lost their CD. To get back in the game, they would have to write a hefty $300 check to Microsoft for something they already owned. Enough was enough and we converted the project to MS word and never looked back.

As for using Publisher under crossover, check the compatability list on their site. They do support quite a bit of software but Crossover is not free. As a last resort you could put. Ahem. Cough. Windows on your Mac using parallels or boot camp and get to your publisher data that way. Frankly, I recommend crayons on cardboard over publisher until or unless Microsoft opens up their file formats.

I found an OS X publisher called Swift Publisher. At $44.95 it costs less than a license for Crossover to run your existing MS publisher program. Download it and try it to see if it does what you need. It exports to pdf but probably has its own proprietary file format. At least it's a mere fraction of the cost of publisher and is an OSX application.

I also found a free open source cross platform publisher program called Scribus. OOPS. Sorry. Scribus is one of those open source things that requires you to install a half dozen things to get one thing working. Too geeky and too cluttered. I'll find an OSX solution properly distributed with a Mac mindset and update this post. For now, skip Scribus.

What do these 2 programs have in common? They don't import pub files because M$ has your data locked up in their vault. You wrote it. You laid it out. But you can't take your data with you when you leave publisher. You owe it to yourself to look around for alternatives to publisher.

I went over to Crossover (Codeweavers.com) and found that Publisher 2000 is the best supported version and gets "bronze" which means it probably doesn't work well enough to get real work done. Darn. So now you must either 1) keep a windows box around 2) run parallels or boot camp to use publisher on your mac or 3) switch to another program. I'm pulling for option 3.

 

I thought one of Pages strengths over Word is in publishing. It may not be a complete replacement for Publisher, but should probably be enough for casual uses. Pages is part of the Apple's iWork suite a trial of which should be on your Mac or can be downloaded online.

http://www.apple.com/iwork/trial/

The new Word in Office 2008 for Mac also includes a publishing mode, which was Microsoft's way of trying to include some Publisher functionality on Mac without actually porting Publisher. I don't believe it can actually open Publisher files though so if you don't already have Office 2008, you should try the iWork trial or something else first.

 

I put together a booklet for a conference I helped run in Office 2008 (a late draft can be seen here) and was reasonably impressed with the functionality. It's nowhere near as good as Scribus (which, if you have the time to learn, is an absolutely amazing tool) but it works for most basic needs.

 

Very impressive brochure, DamienThorn! How did you manage the page placement? Did you manually drag pages around so the cover backed up with page 1 and the back cover backed up with page 16?

I looked at the help file for Swift Publisher and it offers the ability to automatically lay out a booklet. I think this is one of the big selling points of MS Publisher as well. It's not such a big deal to me as I simply drag the pages around to the order I want and then export to a pdf from word or pages and send the pdf to kinkos for printing.

I also looked at Scribus in more detail. Like many open source programs, they don't care if you are put off by a perplexing array of downloads. It turns out there are really only two things you need, not 2 dozen as the site would make it appear. There is a tar.gz file which presumably contains a .app file and there is ghostscript. I will download and try Scribus. I'm particularly interested in Scribus as it has a Windows version and offers me a way to collaborate with Windows users.

 

thanks for the input so far.
MS Publisher is very easy to use and I've had no problems with its format. It is easily exported to pdf and it only costs $29 for educational license.
Surely there is an equivalent in the Mac world.

 

$29 is certainly better than what I've seen. Not bad at all. I don't really count pdf as a true export format because pdf is more like a printer ready format. It isn't intended for extensive editing. Tweaking maybe, but not editing. For me, a program is "open" if it can share files with its competitors. Word, Openoffice writer and Pages can all open doc files.

For low cost, I would recommend Scribus which is free but the install procedure is not one-click or click-and-drag like most of us are used to. To use Scribus, you must also install Ghostscript. You will have to create your document over again in Scribus, Quark or any other DTP tool you choose. In all fairness, I should mention the same would be true if you were going from any one of these programs to MS Publisher. Start with Scribus because it's free. Alternatively you can use Office 2008 on Mac (which should also have fairly decent academic pricing) but there is no MS Publisher for Mac right now. Lastly, there is the shareware Swift Publisher which you can try for free. I would start with Scribus and Swift Publisher. Of course there is always the option to run Windows under Parallels so you can use your existing copy of MS Publisher but Parallels is not free.

 

I found a little plugin (can't recall it's name at the moment) that ultimately arranged the pages as they needed to be arranged when it came time for printing. Pretty well everything that's in the brochure was right out a template that is in Office 2008 - it was a lot faster, and much more powerful, than Pages (which I figured I'd try for the project. My verdict: unimpressed with the lack of power. That said, if I HAD to use Pages, I probably wouldn't kill myself, just annoy people around me as I used it *grin*)

 

I know what you're saying about Pages. Numbers is even worse. Keynote is the shining star of iWork but Pages and Numbers don't really measure up to Word and Excel. Pages is more like a tie in terms of features. But in ease of use, iWork kicks Office butt. So I put up with the quirks and missing features and enjoy simplicity. I got very close to buying Office 2008. Close, that is until my company foisted Office 2007 on me at the office. Gawd how awful. Those ribbons seem to be designed to triple the number of clicks required to accomplish every task. The good news is everything is visible there in front of you. The bad news is only one ribbon is visible at a time and I find myself switching ribbons about 50 times a minute. MS really needs to release a trial of Office 2008 for me to bother with it after my dismal experience with Office 2007 at work.

So that leaves me with OpenOffice and iWork and I'm looking at Scribus. That may be my best option for newsletters, flyers and the like. I can create the basic text in pages and paste it into Scribus and then apply all that fancy formatting. I gotta see if Scribus handles booklets automagically like Swift Publisher does.

I did a multi-page booklet in Word 97. I created all the pages in order, then inserted hard page breaks wherever I wanted them. Then I started moving pages around by hand to get them in print order. 16,1 on one side and 2,15 on the other side of a single sheet, 14,3 on one side and 4,13 on the other side of the second single sheet and so forth. It's not that hard until you start making changes that has text flowing onto the next page Then you find yourself moving text from page 2 to page 7 to page 13 to page 9 to page 1. It's enough to give you a headache. I would not look forward to attempting the same thing in Pages but I'd rather give it a try than cough up money for Office 2008 sight unseen.

 

Actually, The new Word 2008 has a Publisher layout that is specifically for Layouts. It's in competition to iWork's Publishing Aspect of Pages. I've been using Word 2008 and I find it an excellent improvement over it's predecessor. It's really good at laying out although iWork is probably even better. I would start with iWork and Word 2008. You can see demonstrations of both of them below:

Pages, part of iWork is available here:
http://movies.apple.com/movies/us/a...atures_pagelayoutmode_20070807_r640-10cie.mov

Microsoft Word Publishing Layout is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/word2008/default.mspx#/publishing_layout_view/

You can get better than these by stepping up to professional tools, such as Adobe InDesign.. but that's for professionals. If you are used to publisher however, these two programs will do what you need them to do.