Publisher was an abomination
Many years ago I worked in publishing, as the senior pre-press guy for a newspaper. The newspaper would do print jobs for outside clients, on our nice big web press, on newsprint, or, if the client paid enough, on glossy paper instead. We _hated_ Publisher. If a print job came in in Publisher format, we sent it back and told the client to resubmit in Word or PDF. Or a real publishing format, like PageMaker, QuarkXpress, or Adobe InDesign. Most professionals felt the same way. Publisher simply wasn't any good. To this day I use Publisher only to export Publisher files to a useful format. That loud 'Hooo-ray' you heard was publishing and printing pros world-wide expressing their delight at Publisher's demise.
Replacements for it, which would actually work?
1. Word. If you know what you're doing Word is an... okay... layout application. It is definitely lacking in many ways, but will work for most amateur requirements. Yes, you can lay out the double-page church notice poster, if you try; format the thing as a single-page tabloid document (other large page formats available) and print portrait to a printer capable of printing to tabloid (or whatever) pages. There are other ways to get the same general effect. It's not nearly as good as a real two-page layout, but it'll work. Just be careful with columns, and tables, and images.. Especially images. Microsoft has improved how Word handles images over the years. There was a LOT of room for improvement. There still is.
2. Pages. Pages is a much better layout app than Word. It's still not a pro layout tool, but it can be made to work much more easily than Word can. Apple ships Pages with every Mac and iDevice and the web version, which works in Windows and Linux, has most of the real app's features. It's not ideal, but it's better than Word. And it's free, unlike Word. (Well, free as long as you have a Mac or iDevice or an Apple account, anyway...) And it actually handles images in an almost acceptable way.
3. Affinity Publisher. The New Gold Standard. The reason why I bailed from InDesign (well, that, and Adobe were being greedy bastards, not that that's news). The full Affinity suite, Designer, Photo, and Publisher, is available for Mac, Windows, and iDevice for $165 (plus tax). That's a one-time payment of $165 (plus tax) for all three on all three platforms. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/#buy Affinity Publisher is very good indeed. Note that there is a try before you buy option.
