Church bulletins and newsletters: Publisher to PDF and Word

What's in a typical Publisher bulletin

A weekly bulletin is usually a letter-size sheet folded in half, giving four half-letter panels: a cover with the church name, the date and a picture, the order of worship, announcements, and a back page with the calendar, prayer list, staff names and service times. Monthly newsletters are longer, often with two or three columns of articles, a pastor's letter, birthdays and photos from recent events.

These files have a few things in common that matter for conversion:

• Lots of small text boxes: hymn numbers, scripture readings, names of readers and ushers, each in its own box.
• Linked columns in newsletters, where one article flows from column to column or page to page.
• Clip art and cover images, sometimes pasted in from very old collections.
• Fonts that came with Microsoft Office, plus the odd decorative font for the church name.

PubRescue places every text box, splits linked stories across their columns the way Publisher did, and keeps pictures in place.

How to convert your bulletins

1. Gather the files. Bulletins often live on the church office PC, in the secretary's email or on a USB stick. Copy them into one folder, keeping year or month subfolders if you have them.
2. Upload the folder by dragging it onto the box above, or zip it first. One file works too.
3. Check the previews. Click any thumbnail to see every page. Files that deserve a closer look are marked Check layout.
4. Download. Each file has a PDF and a Word button. For a whole archive, a one-time plan unlocks everything as one ZIP: $9 for up to 20 files, $29 for up to 500 files (about nine years of weekly bulletins).

Editing next week's bulletin in Word

Most bulletins change only a little from week to week: the date, the readings, the hymns, the announcements. That's exactly what the Word file is good at.

1. Convert last week's bulletin and download the Word file.
2. Open it in Word (2010 or newer), LibreOffice or Google Docs.
3. Click into the date, hymn numbers and announcements and type the new ones.
4. Save it under the new date and print, or use File > Save As > PDF to email it or post it on your website.

Keep one clean copy as your template and start from it every week. If you print the bulletin folded, check the page order in Word's print preview the first time; the Word file keeps the pages as they were in Publisher.

One thing to know: each text box in the Word file is a separate box sitting on a picture of the page. If an announcement grows much longer, it won't flow into the next column. Keep edits about the same length, or shorten the text. More about how the Word file works on the Publisher to Word page.

What to do with years of old bulletins

Old bulletins are part of the congregation's history: baptisms, weddings, anniversaries, building projects, pastors who came and went. As .pub files, they slowly become unreadable. As PDFs, they open on any phone or computer, and the text is searchable, so "the Easter when we dedicated the new organ" can actually be found.

• Keep the PDFs in a shared folder organized by year. The folder structure you upload is kept in the download.
• Keep the Word files only for the templates you still use (bulletin, newsletter, annual report cover).
• Keep the original .pub files too. They take little space.

See bulk conversion for tips on large archives, and what the Publisher retirement means if you're planning the move for the whole church office.

What to expect

• Fonts are replaced with metric-compatible fonts, so line breaks stay where they were. A decorative font for the church name may look a little different.
• The Word file keeps the look, with text in editable text boxes on top of a page background. It's not a free-flowing document.
• Very old bulletins made in Publisher 98 or 2000 convert with lower accuracy. Check those previews.