The short version. Microsoft Publisher left Microsoft 365 on 1 October 2026, and support for Publisher 2021 ends on 13 October 2026. If your venue laid out table plans and printed place cards in Publisher, you need somewhere else to do it. Creventa replaces the layout work entirely: you build the seating plan once, and the place cards, chef sheet and front of house report all print from it.
What has actually changed
Microsoft confirmed in late 2024 that Publisher would be retired. Two dates matter. On 1 October 2026 Publisher was removed from Microsoft 365, so subscribers can no longer open or edit .pub files in it. On 13 October 2026, support ends for the one-off purchase versions, Publisher 2021 and Publisher LTSC 2021.
If you own a perpetual copy it will keep opening for now, but it is unsupported and will receive no further updates. Microsoft’s own advice is that most of what Publisher did can be done in Word or PowerPoint.
For a banqueting team, that advice misses the point. The problem was never the layout.
Why Publisher was always the wrong tool for a table plan
Publisher is a desktop publishing package. It arranges shapes and text on a page beautifully, and a lot of coordinators got very good at making a room look right in it. But a table plan built in Publisher is a picture of a room. It does not know who is sitting where.
That is why the work multiplies. A guest swaps tables on the Thursday before a 300 cover dinner, and you change it in the plan, then the place card file, then the chef sheet, then the allergen list. Four documents, four chances to miss one. By service, nobody is quite sure which version is the real one.
Word and PowerPoint have the same limitation. They are layout tools too. Moving to them solves the file format problem and leaves the retyping exactly where it was.
What Creventa does instead
Creventa holds your seating as data rather than artwork. You assign a guest to a seat once, and everything downstream reads from that assignment.
Drag and drop seating
Build the room visually, move guests between tables, and flag anyone who is a VIP, a speaker, a child, or has accessibility requirements.
Place cards that print themselves
Your fonts, your logo, your brand colours. Each card carries the guest name, their menu choice and their dietary preference, with allergies clearly flagged.
One change, everywhere
Move a guest and the place card, run sheet, front of house report and chef report all update. There is no second document to remember.
The client does the seating
Give the host access and they assign their own guests to tables. No more spreadsheets emailed back and forth, no re-keying at your end.
Plans drawn to scale, not by eye
There is a second thing Publisher could never do, and for a banqueting team it matters as much as the retyping. It had no idea how big your room was.
In Creventa you work to scale. Drop your room layout in as a background image, straight from the venue CAD drawing or a floor plan, and build the seating on top of it. Set the real size of your tables. Measure the distances between them. What you see on screen is what the room will actually look like when the team sets it up at seven in the morning.
That answers the questions a picture cannot. Whether thirty rounds of ten genuinely fit. Whether there is room to get a wheelchair to table four. Whether the gangway between the top table and the dancefloor is wide enough to serve through. In Publisher those were educated guesses, and you often found out you were wrong on the day.
What you can print
Everything below comes from the same event, with no data entry and no copying between documents:
- Place cards, fully branded, with allergies flagged for service
- Table plans and seating diagrams showing how to set the room
- A guest list with seat positions, in printable A4
- Front of house report, tablet friendly, each guest with their table and seat
- Food pass and run sheet, every guest per table in order with choices and allergies
- Chef’s report summarising every choice by dish
- Function sheet, buffet tent cards and tags with allergen information
On allergens. This is where the retyping really bites. Creventa tracks the 14 mandatory allergens plus anything non standard a guest declares, keeps medical allergies separate from preferences, and flags them on the place card and the pass. It is a documented record rather than a note someone remembered to carry across.
Who this is for
Creventa is built for hotels, golf clubs, restaurants and banqueting teams running everything from a table of four to a gala of 2,500 or more. If the words “I made the table plan in Publisher” sound like your Tuesday afternoon, this is the gap it fills.
One global hotel group using Creventa reported a 20% reduction in food waste, simply from knowing accurate numbers and choices ahead of service rather than estimating.
Moving across from Publisher
An honest note on this: you do not convert your .pub files. There is no import, and there would be little point if there were, because the thing you are moving away from is the document itself.
What happens instead is that you set your place card design up once, with your fonts and your logo, and from then on every event uses it. The first event takes a little setting up. The ones after it take minutes, because the plan, the cards and the kitchen paperwork are the same object.
If you are still working out your options, read what venues should use for table plans now Publisher has retired, or see how Creventa’s seating plans work.
Common questions
Can we use our existing floor plan?
Yes. Add your room layout as a background image, taken from a CAD drawing or an existing floor plan, and build the seating over the top of it to scale. You can set the real size of each table and measure the distances between them, so the plan reflects the room rather than approximating it.
Can I still open my old .pub files?
If you are on Microsoft 365, no, not in Publisher. If you have a perpetual copy of Publisher 2021 it will still open them, but it is unsupported from 13 October 2026. It is worth exporting anything you need to keep as a PDF while you still can.
Could I just use Word or PowerPoint?
You can, and for a one off poster it is fine. For table plans it leaves you where you started, because the seating is still a drawing rather than data, and you will still be retyping the same changes into the kitchen paperwork.
Does it handle place cards for large events?
Yes. Place cards print directly from the platform for events of any size, with the guest name, their choice, their dietary preference, and a clear flag on anyone with an allergy. Company or group names can sit alongside individual names.
Can the client change the seating themselves?
If you want them to. The delegated host can add guests, import a list and assign seats, and you can switch host editing off for events where you would rather keep control.
What if a guest moves on the day?
Change it in the plan and reprint whatever you need. The place card, the pass sheet and the front of house report all come from the same assignment, so they cannot disagree with each other.
See it with your own room
Thirty minutes, your table plan, your menu. We will show you the same event start to finish.
Book a demoCompetitor details on this page are based on each provider's public website and marketing materials, last reviewed October 2026. If anything is out of date, let us know and we will correct it. Creventa results such as wet-spend uplift, time saved and reduced food waste are typical outcomes reported by customers and vary by venue and event.