Microsoft Publisher review That said you can create some very impressive page layouts in Publisher, from single-page posters to 50-page brochures and you dont have to be a DTP expert to do so.

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If you need layouts that are more advanced than Word can offer, however, Publisher is worth a look.

You can pick it up as part of an Office 365 subscription or as part of a one-off Office 2019 purchase.

You can sign up for Office 365 here Microsoft Publisher for Office 365: interface While Publisher is capable of more advanced layouts than Word, its interface is actually more straightforward and less cluttered everything you need from borders to shading to text formatting is easily accessible.

You really can just dive in and get started (the smart guides that pop up to help with alignment are one useful touch here).

Microsoft Publisher review The ribbon menu up at the top of Publisher, as with most Office 365 applications, changes depending on the context: select a text box and you get a different set of options than if you select an image.

The tools and menus (some borrowed from Word, some from PowerPoint) make it easy to get around.

If you are going to use Publisher seriously as a desktop publishing program, then youll want to adapt the interface to suit your own needs, and Publisher makes that possible to an extent.

You can quickly flick between single pages and spreads, normal views and master pages, and toggle elements like boundaries and guidelines on and off with a click.

Whether or not youve spent any time with a DTP package like this before, you can quickly put together something reasonably impressive, whether completely from scratch or using one of the many templates Publisher makes available.

Theyre not the best selection weve ever seen, but theyre good enough to get you started.

Microsoft Publisher review Speaking of templates, the choice of Schemes available under the Page Design tab makes it very easy to adjust the color scheme all across a document something that seasoned designers would probably scoff at, but a trick that could be very useful for the more casual users out there (which Publisher will naturally attract anyway).

Microsoft Publisher for Office 365: features On a basic level, Publisher offers everything you need to create some relatively complex layouts.

Its very much entry-level though: seasoned professionals arent going to use Publisher, many people will just stick with Word, and that leaves whats presumably a small niche of customers who want to have a play around with some small-scale desktop publishing think church magazine, not national daily.

Microsoft Publisher review We do like the way styles, margins, fonts, columns and just about everything else can be picked from a drop-down menu, with dialog boxes available if needed.

With features like drop caps, text direction, hyphenation rules and picture recoloring, Publisher goes beyond what Word can offer.

We would like to see more in the way of image editing and vector graphics creation you certainly cant put together a quick logo in Publisher but Microsoft doesnt seem in any rush to overload this app with features.

There is certainly some crossover with the layout tools you get in Word, too, but if you need exact control over where each element goes particularly with regards to how text interacts with graphics or special output options like pantone or CMYK coloring, Publisher wins out.

Think Word for text-heavy documents, and Publisher for anything with more images or more creative layouts.

You dont get help thats as intuitive as it is elsewhere in Office when it comes to Publisher, unfortunately, and you dont get the same sharing and collaboration tools.

In fact, some of the tabs on the ribbon menu can look rather sparse, as if theyre missing some options.

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