Accessing MS Publisher documents

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Because Microsoft Publisher is a proprietary file format, there is not an easy way to access data in MS Publisher files. There are, however, a few options available which will allow you to get data from your .pub files into NeoOffice.

With Publisher

If you still have a working copy of MS Publisher, your best bet is to export the file in a common interchange format.

  • If the file is saved in Publisher itself as postscript [.ps], the file will then be opened in Preview [Preview converts it to a .pdf file]. You can save the text in a .pub files as a Word doc in Publisher.
  • Someone mentioned copy/paste the entire document into Word, which will preserve some of the layout/formatting and images ??? (on trinity somewhere, I think)

Without Publisher

If you do not have a working copy of Publisher available to you, there is currently one free service that can convert a .pub file into a PDF file (which you can then manipulate on your Mac to produce files that NeoOffice can import.

  • Go to http://www.pdfonline.com/convert_pdf.asp and upload the .pub file and the PDF will be emailed to you.
    • I believe they have a 2 MB limit on files to be converted.
  • Use Preview to extract the text and graphics.
    • Use the Grab selection tool to copy the graphics in the brochure and save each in your favorite NeoOffice-supported graphics file format.
    • Use the text tool to select text and paste it into your favorite Mac text app (or directly into NeoOffice).
      • If the text is in columnar form, select the text tool and held down the Option key while dragging to select just one column.

References

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