Keyboard shortcuts are great for speeding up your workflow. They can also be helpful if your hands are getting sore from using the mouse a lot.
When you hover over any of the tools that have a keyboard shortcut associated with it, you will be able to see in brackets the shortcut associated with it.
For example, when I hover on Pen tool, it says, P is the shortcut. So if I click P I now have the Pen Tool.
And the Move tool is V so I can click V and I get the Move Tool. (If you were just on a text tool, you will need to click away first or it will just type the letter of the shortcut you selected as happened in my video above).
Now, what if you want to add a shortcut for something that doesn’t have one, or edit it to something that makes more sense to you?
You can go to Affinity Publisher on a Mac (top left next to the Apple symbol) and choose Preferences. Find the same menu under Edit menu if you are on a PC.
Under the preferences, you can go to Keyboard Shortcuts, and you will see the shortcuts that you have available there.
Example:
There are personas in Publisher which allow you to switch to the functionality of Designer or Photo if you have those installed on the same computer.
You’ll see that they do not have a shortcut currently associated with it. So I’m gonna click on Designer persona because I actually do go back and forth to that once in a while.
I will assign it something logical, like command D. Now, when I did that it gave me a little warning symbol. That’s because command D’s already in use for something else.
So I’m just going to clear that, and I played around and found that Shift 7 was available. So Shift 7 is going to be my Designer persona shortcut. I type that in and close the box.
Now I can test that, hit SHIFT 7 and voila! Watch as you switch to Designer persona.
Easy to customize and each little tweak like this can shave seconds from your workflow. That’s not a lot in and of itself, but all those little seconds add up to minutes, and eventually hours.
