There are so many great commercial use templates available by wonderful content providers. But what if you are wanting to make the switch to Affinity Publisher? Then what?

Fortunately it is very easy to move almost any template into Publisher and edit it. Watch the video to see how, or read on.

 The first thing I need to do is take my template and create a PDF out of it. In the video I created a simple two page planner spread. 

That’s right, anything that you can make into a PDF, you can bring into Affinity and edit it. 

Now, there are several ways to make a PDF in PowerPoint. If you have Adobe, you might see the option to Save as Adobe PDF, you can also go to the Print menu and switch your printer to Microsoft print to PDF. Or you can go to the Export button and Create a PDF document. That’s what I’m going to do and then I will save it.

Now let’s move to Affinity. All I need to do is go to File–>Open and navigate to wherever you saved your PDF.

It’s going to bring up a dialog box. I’m going to load all pages, you can also select certain pages to load. 

I’m going to leave the DPI at 300. And I’m going to leave the color on RGB and just say OK, and it’s going to load my PDF into the Pages window.

So if you are familiar with Affinity Publisher, the pages are the actual pages in your document. If you want to create a template that you can apply to your entire document– that is make repeating pages of the same thing–you really want to have them in master pages.

That’s pretty simple to do. All I’m going to do is create a new master.  I’m not going to change any of the defaults for the purposes of this demo, because this really isn’t about the Pages and Master Pages window.

So let’s go back to Pages. I have the Move tool selected. I am just going to highlight over all of the page content, and then use my keyboard shortcut Ctrl + C, you can also go to Edit –> Copy, if you would like.

That copied everything on the page. Now I can go click on the Master Page I created (it’s now outlined in blue). I will double click on it to select it, and then Ctrl + V to paste  or Edit –> Paste if you would like.

Now I have moved that content into a Master Page

I always work in Master Pages for any layout that will repeate itself so I can make global edits across the document. Again, not going to get too deep into the difference between these two because that’s not the focus of this video.

So now, we can edit anything on the page here.

You’ll notice all the text boxes are already outlined in blue, but really, you can edit anything.

I can click on the text box, go to my Frame Text tool.  I can highlight the text and change the size of the font.  I can change the type of font that we’re using. And I could change the color, all sorts of things.

With my Move tool on, I can click on any of the shape boxes and adjust their size or shape,  or add a fill.  I can change the stroke outline. I can change the weight of the line.

Some of the elements may   look like it’s not editable but once you click on it, you will get the controls to be able to edit it.

I can change the color of lines, I can change the weight, I can change the length, I can delete them.

So I think you can see that if you have anything in a PDF format, you can bring it into Publisher and you will be able to edit it.

That’s pretty awesome and it opens up a wide world of commercial use templates that you can use within Affinity Publisher.