The History and Features of Microsoft Office Publisher
When selecting your desktop publishing software, you need to get one which allows creation of a number of projects, has many graphics, text and photo tools. The program you select also needs to be simple to use and empower you with many different choices when it comes to sharing and printing your projects. If you have any queries regarding the software, the software maker needs to provide you with sufficient support and help in order to get those queries answered. The best program is the one that meets your needs and gets you closer to the making of beautiful and complex printed creations.
Introduction to Microsoft Office Publisher:
The MS Office Publisher was formerly known as MS Publisher, which is a Microsoft Desktop Publishing Software. The Publisher is an entry level application and differs from the MS Word in the fact that it puts more emphasis on the page layouts and design instead of just the text composition and its proofing. The recent version of the software is called Microsoft Office Publisher 2010 for the OS Windows and was released in June 2010. There is no version of this software available to be run on Mac.
Features of Microsoft Publisher:
The Microsoft Publisher 2007 provided simple story editing along with MS Word 2007. However unlike the Adobe InDesign and Adobe InCopy, this software does not provide a built in XML story board and support for copy editing. Quite unlike most of the fundamental Office 2007 programs, it does not have the Ribbon user interface. This Ribbon interface is provided as a feature in Microsoft Publisher 2010.
The trial version of Microsoft Publisher can be used by the users even beyond the trial period. This software combines the pc and WYSIWYG page layout software for creating publication documents on a pc. They may be huge scale local multi functional peripheral output with distribution. The software is suitable for creating posters, banners, advertisements, calendars, flyers, personalized greeting cards and a lot of other printed material.
History of Microsoft Publisher:
Some radical changes in Publisher were first introduced with Microsoft Office 2000 suite. For almost all the users, the most obvious changes that were introduced in Publisher 2000 along with the rest of the suite included the presence of a clipboard which could hold many objects at the same time. Another change that was noticeable was that the Office Assistance was changed so that it became less intrusive. The frequent unsolicited appearances of the Office Assistance in Publisher 1998 had annoyed most users.
Market Position of Microsoft Publisher:
The Publisher holds a relatively small portion of the big desktop publishing market. The market is dominated more by Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. The Publisher historically has been less popular with the high-end commercial print shops as compared to the other similar desktop publishing applications mentioned above. The position held by Publisher as entry level software aggravates most of the issues (typically more in the older versions) such as the unavailability of fonts and embedded objects not being available on service provider machines. Publisher is available with tools to assemble related files in one self expanding software application. However the newer versions of Publisher have shown greater abilities in the area of color separation and correct process coloring output. The Publisher 2007 also included the ability to output PDF with commercial press quality and with embedded fonts.
The Publisher that is available with higher end editions of MS Office reflects the emphasis of Microsoft on Publisher as a simple and less expensive alternative to the other bigger competitors. The focus is also on the small business markets where the companies do not have dedicated professionals in design available for making marketing material and other documents.
The proprietary file format of the Publisher is a ".pub" file. It is however not supported by other applications. The only exceptions to this being Adobe PageMaker and Corel DRAW X4. However the Publisher supports many other file formats that include the EMF (Enhanced MetaFile) format that is supported by Windows platforms.
