Make it in Korva
How to Make a Church Bulletin After Microsoft Publisher
To make a church bulletin, start from a ready-made church bulletin template, edit the text right where it sits, swap in your own photos, drop in this week's service times, then export a print-ready PDF. Korva ships with a Church Bulletin template built for exactly this, and you don't need Microsoft Publisher or any subscription to use it. Here's the whole workflow, written for the volunteer who does this every Saturday.
If you’ve been the one making the Sunday bulletin in Microsoft Publisher for years, you know the rhythm by heart. Open last week’s file. Change the date. Drop in the new readings. Fix the typo someone caught after the 9 a.m. service. Print fifty copies and fold them at the kitchen table. It worked fine. The catch is that Publisher retires on October 1, 2026, and plenty of churches are only now realizing their bulletin lives inside a program that’s about to stop being sold.
The bulletin itself isn’t going anywhere, though, and making one is honestly easy in a tool built for the job. Let’s walk through it.
Start from the Church Bulletin template
Open Korva and pick Church Bulletin from the template list. You get a finished, two-page layout: a cover with a title and a place for art, an order-of-service column, a section for announcements, and a footer for contact details. It’s a real starting point rather than a blank page daring you to fill it.
Would you rather rebuild the look of your old Publisher bulletin? You can do that too. Open your existing .pub file in Korva first. It pulls the text (accents and all) and every embedded image out of the file and reflows them onto an editable page. From there you tidy the layout to match. For a longer look at moving your whole archive across, see our guide on migrating from Microsoft Publisher.
Either way, save your working file as a .pwl document right away. That’s Korva’s own format, and it round-trips fully, so next week you reopen it exactly as you left it.
.pwl, and from then on you're only changing the date, the readings, and a photo. The hard part is a one-time setup. Every week after is a five-minute edit.Edit the text in place
This is the part people brace themselves for, and it turns out to be the easiest. Double-click any text box and start typing where it sits. No dialog boxes. No separate panel to hunt through.
When a text box is active you get controls for the things you actually change:
- Font family, size, and colour
- Bold, italic, underline
- Alignment and line spacing
- Text inset, so words don’t crowd the edge of the box
A handful of practical moves for a bulletin specifically:
- Cover title and date. Double-click the title, retype your church’s name if needed, then update the date underneath. The date is the one thing you’ll change every single week, so know where it lives.
- Order of service. Retype the hymn numbers, readings, and the sermon title. Keep line spacing a touch generous here. It reads better at arm’s length in a pew.
- Announcements. This is where the meeting times, the potluck sign-up, and the prayer requests go. If you have a lot to fit, shrink the font a point or two rather than cramming.
Need to change the same wording everywhere, like a recurring meeting that moved from Tuesday to Wednesday? Press Ctrl/Cmd + F to open Find & Replace and fix it across the whole document at once.
Swap the photos
A bulletin lives and dies on its cover image. A photo of the church, a seasonal illustration, a snapshot from last week’s baptism. Korva makes the swap quick.
Double-click a picture frame to work inside it. You can pan the image around within the frame, zoom in with the scroll wheel or a slider, and flip it horizontally or vertically when that helps the composition. To use a different photo entirely, insert your new image, drag it into place, and resize with the corner handles.
As you drag, Korva snaps to the page edges, the centre, the margins, and to other objects, with guide lines that pop up while you move. Lining the photo up neatly under the title takes a second instead of a fiddly minute of nudging.
One quality detail is worth knowing. When you export, embedded JPEG photos are stored losslessly in the PDF, so the cover photo that looked sharp on screen looks sharp on the printed page.
Add this week’s service info
The recurring content (service times, the staff list, the giving details) tends to sit in the same spots every week. A few ways to keep it tidy:
- Group the items that always travel together. Shift-click the service-times block and its heading, and you can move, align, or duplicate them as one unit.
- Lock the boxes you never touch. Right-click a finished element and lock it, so you don’t accidentally drag the address off the footer while editing nearby.
- Use the Objects panel to see everything at once. Every box, photo, and shape is listed there. Click to select, reorder, hide, or lock. Handy when the cover gets busy.
Does your bulletin run more than two pages? Add them. Korva handles multi-page documents with live thumbnails down the side, so a four-page Easter bulletin is no harder than a one-sheet.
Reuse it next week without starting over
Here’s the habit that saves real time. You don’t make a new bulletin each week. You reopen last week’s and change what’s new.
Two approaches that hold up:
| Approach | Best for | How it works |
|---|---|---|
Reopen and edit the .pwl | The weekly bulletin | Open last week’s saved file, change the date, readings, and photo, export. Fastest for routine weeks. |
| Duplicate the file first | Keeping an archive | Copy the .pwl, rename it with this week’s date, then edit the copy. You keep a dated record of every bulletin. |
For pages that repeat in the same document, like a standing back-page calendar across a multi-week booklet, duplicate the page and edit the copy. The idea stays the same throughout: build the structure once, then only touch what changes.
Export a PDF to print or email
When the bulletin is ready, export it. Pick your page size, US Letter or A4, set the orientation, then export to PDF.
What you see on screen is what prints. Korva draws the on-screen canvas and the PDF from one render scene, so the layout comes out pixel-faithful. Text uses the standard PDF fonts with WinAnsi encoding, which keeps accented names and titles intact, and colour is RGB.
That RGB detail matters for setting expectations. An RGB PDF is right for emailing the bulletin to your mailing list, posting it on the church website, and printing on your office copier or at a local print shop’s short-run service. If you were ever sending bulletins to a commercial offset press that demands CMYK with bleed and crop marks, Korva doesn’t produce that, and it won’t pretend to. For the way most churches actually print, an office copier or a quick run at the local shop, an RGB PDF is exactly what you hand over.
Two outputs from the one file:
- To print: export the PDF, open it, print double-sided, fold. Done.
- To email: attach the same PDF to your weekly newsletter, or upload it to the website so members who missed the service can read along.
If you only ever need the PDF and won’t be editing, the free Reader & Converter tier covers that on its own. More on the free Microsoft Publisher alternative and what each tier includes.
Mailing the bulletin? Use mail merge for member labels
Plenty of churches still post a printed bulletin to homebound members or to the wider parish. Addressing those by hand is the kind of job that eats a Saturday afternoon.
Korva includes an Address Labels template (the common Avery 5160 style, 30 labels per sheet, three columns by ten rows on US Letter) that’s mail-merge ready. Export your member list as a .csv file with columns like name, street, city. Load that file, place {{field}} placeholders on the label, and Korva generates one filled label per row. Print the sheet, peel, stick.
The same merge works for personalized certificates or staff business cards, if those come up. One CSV, one filled page per row.
Why churches are switching from Publisher
Publisher has been the church office workhorse for two decades, and that’s no insult. It was approachable and it did the job. But it only ran on Windows, it needed a Microsoft 365 plan to keep using, and now it’s being retired. No volunteer should have to renew a subscription just to make a one-page bulletin.
Here’s a fair look at the alternatives people weigh up:
| Tool | Cost | Reads .pub? | Built-in church bulletin? | Runs offline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 / Publisher | Subscription | Yes (native) | Yes, until Oct 2026 | Yes |
| LibreOffice Draw | Free | Sometimes, results vary | No | Yes |
| Scribus | Free | No direct import | No | Yes |
| Online converters | Free / freemium | View / convert only | No | No, uploads your file |
| Korva | Free tier; $49 one-time editor | Yes (text + images) | Yes | Yes |
LibreOffice Draw is a genuinely useful free suite, and its .pub import sometimes opens older files, though complex layouts can come in scrambled. Scribus is strong page-layout software but doesn’t import .pub directly, so you’d rebuild from scratch. Online converters are fine for a throwaway file, but they upload your document to a server, which you may think twice about for anything carrying member names. If you need a clean PDF from an old file fast, our walkthrough on converting .pub to PDF ranks every method.
Korva’s pitch to a church office is plain. It runs entirely on your own computer with no account, no cloud, and no telemetry. The full editor is a one-time $49 purchase with two seats, so the office volunteer and the assistant can both have it, and there’s nothing to renew. Your member list and your bulletins never leave the building.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free church bulletin template I can use?
Yes. Korva’s free tier opens .pub files and exports PDFs at no cost, and the Church Bulletin template is built in. The full editor, which lets you save and reuse your own .pwl bulletin file each week, is a one-time $49 purchase rather than a subscription.
Can I keep using my old Publisher bulletin design?
You can. Open your existing .pub file in Korva and it extracts the text and every embedded image onto an editable page. Tidy the layout to match your old look, save it as a .pwl, and reuse that file from then on. No Microsoft Publisher required.
How do I make the bulletin every week without rebuilding it?
Save your bulletin as a .pwl file once. Each week, reopen it, change the date, the readings, and the cover photo, then export a fresh PDF. If you want a dated archive, duplicate the file first and edit the copy.
Can I print my bulletin at a professional printer?
For office copiers and most local short-run print shops, yes, an RGB PDF works fine. Korva exports faithful RGB PDFs but not CMYK with bleed or crop marks, so a commercial offset press with strict prepress requirements would need dedicated software. Most churches print on a copier or a quick local run, where RGB is exactly right.
Do I need to be online to make a bulletin?
No. Korva runs entirely on your own computer with no sign-in and no internet connection needed. Your bulletins and any member lists stay on your machine.
Making the Sunday bulletin shouldn’t hinge on a subscription that’s winding down. If you want to keep your church’s design and the weekly rhythm intact, download Korva, open the Church Bulletin template, and have your first PDF ready before the coffee’s cold. Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation; Korva is an independent product and isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.
