How to copy Publisher pages into another Publisher file?

No, sorry but there has been no new way that I know of and I have read 99% of the Publisher posts on this forum. With that said I would love for someone else to post a new and better way. Copy and paste and tweak the layout and formatting as necessary. Yeah, a bit tedious but better than starting from scratch.

The instructions I gave back in 2017 for copy and pasting entire pages of content still work for me without the problems you are experiencing. If you group everything on the page before you copy, then all the design elements should not shift or change formatting when you paste into the new page. You can drag the content around together before you ungroup if perchance you need to adjust the placement on the page.

I will paste those instructions here for others to read:

Try:

Open a new blank publication and add as many pages as you will copy.

Go to original publication first page > Ctrl + A (select all) > Ctrl + Shift + G (or Home tab, Arrange group and Group) > Ctrl C or Copy. Repeat for each page you want to copy up to 24 pages.

Go back to new blank publication > open clipboard > select first page and Ctrl + V [edit: or the paste button] and Ctrl + Shift + G to ungroup. Repeat for each page.

DavidF

Reference: Add and print crop marks in Publisher: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-and-print-crop-marks-in-publisher-4579423d-3901-42a6-8142-713a10270600

DavidF

Thanks David, that's exactly what I discovered last night!

I can invoke the Microsoft "Print to PDF" printer driver, change the paper size and pages per sheet settings and get a nice pdf page output.

The only difference to Publisher's normal "export to PDF", that I can see, is that I don't get any cropmarks on the pdf output but I actually prefer that! Is there a setting I've missed to get rid of them on the normal pdf export in Publisher?

Sorry you aren't getting the results you want. My best guess is that the word wrapping around the pictures is what is distorting your pasted results.

If you need only one page converted to a PDF then why don't you print just that page to a PDF driver? You probably have a Win10 PDF driver that you can select with your print setup, and choose to print only that page. Or, download and install PrimoPDF, my personal favorite that I have been using since before MSFT introduced PDF capability in Office 2007. It is free and also allows you to append PDF files which you cannot do with any MSFT driver. When you install it read carefully and opt out of the extra toolbars and crapware that that can be bundled with these free utilities.

DavidF

Hi, sorry I thought I'd replied to this long ago, but it obviously didn't send... or something.

Thanks for your reply, I am definitely following your instructions and am grouping the elements before copy and pasting. But it still messes with the text formatting.

As an example, today I am trying to extract a single page of a 12-page booklet as a pdf. so I want to copy the page content and paste it into a new single page document

It consists of a two-line heading, and about 350 words of text and three images, with the text is flowed around the pictures. A simple frame surrounds it all.

As soon as I paste, I can see that the text has overflowed out of the frame and the text is now not surrounding the pictures neatly. What has happened is that all of the line spacing and paragraph spacing for the heading and the body text have all changed (back to defaults?). I would have previously set those in order to fit the text into the frame and to make the text align with the images neatly. That all gets messed up.