I'm not able to enable ligatures in MS Publisher. When I go to the Font menu, all of the Typography options are greyed-out and unselectable. I'm using the most recent font release (1.51) but can't seem to make it work.
I've looked into this and unfortunately it looks like MS Publisher 2016 doesn't support OT features. The most direct evidence I found was a mod on the Microsoft support forums saying, in 2019, that the only MS Office app that supports OT features is Word.
I don't have MS Publisher, but you could try downloading Vollkorn, a font with a wide range of OT features, and see if that works. If it does, then I can look into what it does differently to Dicier (if anything).