Mourning Publisher

It seems odd to say I am mourning the loss of a computer program. But, with Microsoft eliminating Publisher at the end of September, I find I am. More so, I am mourning the loss of my work.

I am mourning the loss of decades of work forever frozen in PDF or in files that can not be opened. Hundreds, thousands of hours of writing and re-writing, layout, editing, cropping and fine-tuning

Frustration

Tears

Dried out contacts

Missed meals

and finally, Joy or even Glee upon completing a publication.

I estimate 70 to 80 percent of my work is in Publisher. Prior to recent years as spreadsheets have dominated my “day job” life, that number was much higher. For a little more than a quarter century, I have used Publisher to create workshop handouts, patterns, templates, little pamphlets, holiday freebies, e-books, and full workbooks.

For each publication, I have bits and pieces of thought, layers of process to get from an idea, a vision to come together into something presentable. The space around a Publisher page filled with fragments – photos, illustrations, passages that belong somewhere. Often five versions of a title waiting for me to decide which I like. That vast gray space acted as a worktable and an extension of my brain at the same time.

While I mourn the loss of my thought process for completed materials, I mourn my incomplete projects more. I have countless projects laid out in Publisher, incomplete spread across pages waiting for me to find the time to return to fill in the rest. Among them:

Children’s Quilted Winter Hoods (This is a skeleton half formed)
Pieced & Patchwork Pockets (A publication I planned for this summer)
An Ongoing Study in Winter Hoods (A comprehensive volume on my work with winter hoods)
A publication on dolls used in sewing accessories
The 1840-1850s straw bonnet workbook
The 1880s capote bonnet workbook

I’ve been trying to save what I can. But, the reality is these materials saved as PDFs or page jpgs might as well be lost because they are not longer in a format that can be easily pieced back together. Quality is lost. The skeleton of the project is lost.

Each will need to be started again from scratch… after I choose, pay for, and learn a new platform/program.

In the end, losing Publisher and not being able to easily open decades of my work feels much like moth-balling a program, be it the end of a literacy program, or a summer camp. I am sad. I feel loss. I mourn.