An Affinity with Data
Friday, March 28, 2025
Ever needed to create a set of images or print files for a bunch of things like upcoming events, that all share the same types of data? Today, I discovered the power of Affinity Publisher’s data-merge features and how they can be super-charged with some clever Excel work!
Let me turn back a few pages here, as some of you may know Jae and I recently took on the joint management of Bloomin Beads, a bead store and event space owned by Jae’s mom. My role is as Technical & Creative Manager which means I’ve been responsible for our rebrand and getting a consistent style across all of our print and digital marketing and communication.
I already used the fantastic Affinity suite of products for all our Crossed Wires design work, and for the I’ve done for clients. For me, and I suspect the reason so many have ditched the subscription giant Adobe, for Affinity is their commitment to perpetual licensing that’s survived even after their acquisition by Canva.
Today’s task was to produce a printable list of our upcoming classes in the event space and to have individual 9:16 1080p images for our digital signage system (a special mention here to AbleSign - an amazing digital signage tool that works on Android and Android TV devices, oh and it’s free!).
We have all our class information in an Excel sheet in the company OneDrive, and with Affinity Publisher I can create either single page ‘grid’ layouts to pull in multiple items, or have it create multiple full page layouts based on the data available. What’s even more powerful is that you can have file paths and URLs in the Excel data that can be used for dynamic images, links, and QR codes in the finished products.
However, I was missing something that would have put the cherry on top of an already rather impressive design bun, the ability to change colours and other elements of the design based on data from the Excel sheet (other data sources are of course available). Well, that’s when I found this great tutorial from Elaine Giles that showed how you can use Excel’s formula tools to create file paths to Affinity Designer (or any other) image files that can be your background layer, or any other design element.
What this meant for me is that, for the digital signage variants, I could have a different background design based on the skill level of the class in question - green for beginner, blue for intermediate, and a purple for advances. That design was then pulled into the generated images and with some patience I was able to line everything up and have some really great results.
I honestly hadn’t even thought this was be possible, as I had wrongly assumed that Publisher was purely for print work and that any digital designs had to be confined into Designer, which does not have said data-merge functionality. However, I couldn’t have been more wrong, as with Affinity’s 2.0 versions the ‘Studio’ system means I can work up the data layout in the Publisher persona, move to Designer to add fancier effects and vector work, and then back to Publisher to generate the final output file.
I guess it’s true you really do learn something new every day!
James