Microsoft Publisher for Mac

Melissa asks:

Do you know if there’s a Microsoft Pub­lisher ver­sion for mac? i know they have office.…(working on a newslet­ter that’s done in pub­lisher, for now any­way, but I have my mac)

Unfor­tu­nately there isn’t any easy way to con­vert a Microsoft Pub­lisher file to some­thing that you can edit on your Mac. You can point fin­gers at Microsoft for releas­ing a pro­gram that is so pro­pri­etary that noth­ing else sup­ports it (our vote!), or you can blame Apple for not try­ing to sup­port a some­what pop­u­lar pro­gram on their plat­form. Either way, you’ve got a file you can’t open now that you’ve switched to your Mac. Here’s a few options:

• If you still have access to the Win­dows com­puter with Pub­lisher on it, you export/save as from Pub­lisher as a Word doc­u­ment which will then be able to be opened by var­i­ous pro­grams on your Mac (i.e. Microsoft Word for Mac, Apple’s Pages, OpenOf­fice, etc). You’ll most likely lose some for­mat­ting but at least the con­tents of your doc­u­ment are there to be edited.
• Again, assum­ing you still have access to the Win­dows com­puter with Pub­lisher on it — You could take a screen­shot on your Win­dows com­puter of the var­i­ous graphic ele­ments (i.e. logos, graphs, funky text) and then copy and paste the text into one of the pro­grams men­tioned above and rebuild your document.
• Appar­ently, though we’ll have to say we haven’t tried this our­selves, using an old ver­sion of Adobe’s Page­maker for Win­dows you can open the Pub­lisher file, save it as an Adobe InDe­sign file which will then be use­able by Adobe InDe­sign for Mac. We don’t rec­om­mend this route unless you already have the pro­grams as they are quite expen­sive and unless the doc­u­ment is going to gen­er­ate or save you a bunch of money (or if your time is worth a lot of money?), it’s not worth pur­su­ing this route.

Unfor­tu­nately that’s the best we could come up with. Any­one else have any good sug­ges­tions or things that have worked for you?