What are the advantages of using Microsoft Publisher over making your own brochure, from scratch, in Word?

Publisher is designed specifically for making brochures, dealing with photos and vector art.

Word is basically a typewriter that tolerates inserted photos sometimes.

Publisher will put out a brochure and Word will put out a letter.

Desktop publishing software is made to easily and precisely control the location of items on the page.

If you’ve tried that in Word you know it’s squirmy. Like when you get your picture where you want it, the text flows around the wrong side. Or you add text and picture squirts down to bottom.

However, Publisher, like all software has a learning curve.

So if you know Word really well, you might get your project done faster, especially if you start with a template and stick within its parameters.

Forget Excel for brochures, unless, again, you have a template and color within the lines.

Word Art in Word let me as @Seek points out make some (IMO) stellar insertable word graphics and I only did so because I was challenged by what I knew and could do. Got 3 decent brochures thrown together in the process on a shoe string budget. My last project was done professionally and worth every penny.

@Tropical_Willie Oh, Word can do a LOT more than just put out a letter.

@Dutchess_III Yes, Word can do more but it was conceived to produce a document.

I’ve been using document producing programs, since the 80’s before WYSIWYG. It is better to use a tool for it was designed for. My poor wife has an associate that is trying to use Excel for 10,000 items with 40 or 50 relationships in a business environment. Every time she tries to access an item from the spreadsheet, it crashes the server at her office (she works from home).
Operative word was ACCESS, he doesn’t know how to use a database management system like Access by Windows to build something that is usable outside the immediate office.

@Call_Me_Jay Just for the future, if you’re trying to insert a picture in to a Word document, after you’ve pasted it in, right click on the picture and chose “wrap text.’ If you then click on either “In front of text,” or “behind text,” it frees every thing up so you can move the picture anywhere in the document with out messing up the placement of the text.