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Help! Can’t Open a Microsoft Publisher File

by Jason Bean on March 18th, 2008

Have I shared recently (or ever) how much Microsoft Office Publisher irritates me? First there’s the file size of the end resulting file itself. Those suckers are massive. I used to get the files regularly from web clients and their questions would be:

• Can you open a Publisher file?
• How can I e-mail this to you?

When I was first presented with these challenges, broadband Internet wasn’t nearly as widespread as it is now, so people were trying to send multiple MB sized files over a dial-up connection. Hit start and go to bed! On top of that, most e-mail systems had lower limits on file size then too.

Now the biggest problem for me is just opening the file. The problem isn’t that I don’t want to buy the software either, I own it. I just never use it and don’t want to install the huge application for the sporadic times when someone sends me a file in Publisher’s format.

What are my options?

As the recipient not much. I could tell the sender to publish the file as PDF or XPS document, but there are inherent challenges with that with my clients as well.

That brings us back to what my options are…

From this point, I can’t think of much. Which brings me to the question of this post. Why in the world doesn’t Microsoft provide a free Publisher file viewer tool like they do with Word and PowerPoint? Isn’t that obvious?

I would think they might actually sell more copies of Publisher if they made sharing the resulting file types easier.

The next task would be improving some kind of compression algorithms to reduce those file sizes.

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POSTED IN: Office, PowerPoint, Resources, Software, Software Wishlist, User Experience, Word