My Mac Q & A Question: What can I do with Microsoft Publisher files on OS X? They won’t open in anything. J.C., Missoula Microsoft Publisher files – Windows files with the suffix.pub – are simply not compatible with anything other than Publisher, and not even Microsoft Office for the Mac will open them. It looks like the only free way to get Microsoft Publisher files into something of a usable format for import into other applications on OS X is to export the file out of Publisher as a pdf (on a Windows PC). That way you can then import into Acrobat Pro on OS X – because pdf files are cross-platform – and work with them. Now, Acrobat can’t completely import the Publisher files and convert them, but the basic text and graphics will be usable.
Acrobat Pro is pretty good at editing pdfs and matching fonts in place, so that might be the best way to deal with a.pub file. If you need to get the files into a page layout program like InDesign, you can import that pdf into InDesign, but you’ll need to redo the layers to a large extent. Some versions of Publisher allow export in html, so that might be an option, but that depends on what your end product might be. And I haven’t tried that export to see if the images are exported and usable in other applications. If you have a lot of work in your Publisher files and really need them in InDesign with all the graphics and text retained, there is a third-party plugin for InDesign that will import Publisher files, but it’s not cheap at $199 and I don’t have any experience with it.
Space bar not working For some reason the space bar is not working in Publisher. It works in all my other Microsoft products (word, excel, Outlook, etc). It works in all my other Microsoft products (word, excel, Outlook, etc).
See Update 6/12/13: Some people have had success using an online document converter called to open and convert.pub files.
By When switching from Office for Windows to Office for Mac, you’ll discover that you can’t open Microsoft Publisher files in Office 2011 for Mac. You need to convert your Publisher files to Word (.docx) format by using Microsoft Office on a PC.
After that, you can move those Word files to Office for Mac. When you open the Word file from Windows on your Mac, the result won’t be perfect. You have to recreate the links between the text boxes, and the layout may need tweaking, but this is the best way to migrate Publisher files.
To convert a Publisher document to Word in Office 2010 on Windows, do the following. Open the document you want to convert using Microsoft Publisher 2010 for Windows. Press Ctrl-A to select all the content. Press Ctrl-C to copy all the content to the Windows Clipboard. Open a new, blank Microsoft Word 2010 document.
![Microsoft Microsoft](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125449435/557412689.jpg)
Press Ctrl-V to paste the Clipboard contents into Word. Click the Save button on the Quick Access Toolbar. The resulting Word (.docx) file can now be moved to your Mac. If you’re moving other types of files from Office for Windows to Office 2011 for Mac, you shouldn’t experience many hiccups. Because the file formats for Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are identical on both Macs and PCs, no file conversions are needed. After you copy your files from your PC and move them to your Mac, you can — with very few exceptions — simply open your documents and templates in Office 2011. Files that contain properly written add-ins and macros should also work.
Macros and add-ins that use Windows platform-specific code don’t work, but you usually can modify them to work in Office 2011.