Affinity 3 by Canva : Create a Wall Calendar Template with Data Merge

1. Welcome to Class!: What if your best photographs could double as the most thoughtful gift you've ever given? What if you could reach a broader audience with a collection of your original artwork? Whether you're putting them together for personal reasons or to generate more income from your art through print on demand, calendars are a great way to pull your memories and creativity together in a functional way. Have you always wanted to create a calendar featuring your own artwork, but you weren't sure where to begin? If so, welcome to class. Hey, everyone. I'm Chicago area artist and teacher Tracey Capone. For the last several years, wall calendars with my artwork have been one of my top sellers, but I used to find the process of creating them cumbersome and inefficient. So I set out to find a way to create templates and Affinity that allow me to generate a variety of calendars quickly and easily year after year using data merge. In this class, not only am I sharing that process, I'm sharing the data I use to create the calendars as well. We'll begin in class talking about considerations when researching calendar options and download templates to help us create our initial guides. Next, we'll talk about how Master Pages can help us create set layouts, including guides and margins once to apply to multiple content pages. We'll follow that up with a look at the tools that will help us create our calendars more efficiently, text and picture frames, text styles, and the data merge layout tool. From there, we'll take a deeper dive into the data merge panel so we can get our data hooked up to our templates, making the process work in minutes. Now, don't worry, I have you covered with the data. As a thank you for taking the class and providing an Excel spreadsheet with all of the data you'll need to create wall calendars with both a Sunday and Monday start between now and the year 2040. Yep, 2040. For this class, I'll be using Affinity 3 by Canva, the unified desktop app. If you're following long on Publisher V Version two, you should have no trouble completing the class as long as you know where the tools are located. This class is intended for Affinity users with some experience with either the Unified app or Publisher V Version two. We won't be covering the basics of the user interface and tools, so to have a successful experience, I do recommend a basic understanding of how things are laid out. I've shared some resources to get you up to speed in the PDF provided with class. Are you ready to pull your artwork together in a fun and functional wall calendar using Affinity? If so, let's get started. 2. The Class Project: The project for this class is to create your own calendar template using the tools and process we cover in class. Whether you use Gelato, Printify or another print on demand site, the basics of calendar creation taught in the class are the same. Just make sure that you find out the specs for the company you plan to work with. Try out the following. Create master pages for common layouts, so you only have to create them once. Use those layouts to set up guides based on the templates that you download from the print on demand company. Set up textiles for ease in changing the aesthetics of your calendars. Use tables to create a grid layout for your months. Use the data merge tool to create placeholders for your dates, making it easy to recreate the calendar year after year. Use picture frames to quickly add and swap your images for each calendar and save your designs templates so you can use a clean copy anytime and any year you want to make a new calendar. I'd love to see what you create, and sharing your project helps other students see what to learn when they take the class. Please consider sharing yours to the projects and resources section. I've shared tips on sharing your project in the PDF provided. Coming up next, we'll talk about considerations when choosing a print on demand company and downloading templates from the company of your choice to make sure you're creating the exact calendar that you need. I'll see you there. 3. Print on Demand Templates & Options: Before you begin creating a calendar, I recommend exploring different print on demand options to determine what will best fit your needs. There are a number of options out there with printers in various regions around the world, so be sure to do your research before making your final choice because it's not one size fits all. You're also not held to one print on demand company if you don't want to be. If there are a few different styles of calendars you'd like to offer from different distributors, most online shops, including Etsy, will sync with multiple companies so you can pick and choose which products you want to pull from each. Now, one word of caution when you're researching the options. Unless the listing images explicitly show you what your final calendar will look like based on your selections, I recommend jumping into the design studio. Looking at how it's laid out. The calendars here on Gelato are a good example of why I say that. I use Gelato to create a vertical calendar for my shop. Instead of a traditional coil with a hole, they have a wired hanging mechanism that has a half loop in the middle. So these are the two options for North America, and on the surface, they look like the same calendar layout. If I click into this first one, you can see that in addition to orientation, I have several size options available to me, as well. The vertical calendar has that non standard coil that I just mentioned. If I click into the horizontal, let me go to this second listing page. You can see it's more like a traditional calendar. It has the standard coil at the top, and it has a hole for hanging, which means that's going to cut into my design. Let me open this one up in the design studio. For this option, the images and grids are on two separate pages, but you can see that the image doesn't bleed to the edge of the page, so I would have to crop. The other thing that I'm not sure about with this one is the back page can't be printed, and I really like to create something that has thumbnails on the back as a preview of the images inside. The second option doesn't give me a size choice. It's all 8.5 by 11. The vertical looks just like the other one, but look at the horizontal. It's the same. It has that same hanging mechanism. Now, you might think that would work better for me because there's no hole to take into account, but that's not necessarily true. If I open up the design in the design studio, you can see that both the image and the grid are on the same page. And because it's horizontal, I have a lot less room for both. My image is going to be very severely cropped. My calendars, I want to offer as much space as I can for a person to write out their events while also giving me plenty of room to share my photography and illustrations. But I wouldn't have necessarily known that until I opened it up here in the design studio or pulled in the template. With all of that said, for the calendars I'm creating in this class, I've decided to use the horizontal calendars and Printify because I think that'll fit my needs best. They offer a full page for both the image and the grid. I have a choice of sizes. I can also edit the back page to create an array of thumbnails as a preview for the images inside. I'm selecting the blank wall calendar because in addition to adding my own images, I want to create my own grids so I can control how they're set up, as well as the aesthetics of them. Ultimately, I'm going to create one in each size, but for this class, I'm going to go with 14 by 11.5. Now, I can fill all this out later, but right now, what I want to do is download the template. Printify, you'll find that under the Start Designing and under this little eye icon here. So you can just go ahead and download the design template. It's actually going to download all sizes. You don't need to pick which one you want first. So I'll go ahead and download that. Make sure the zip files expanded so I'm all set to load it into Affinity and set my guides up once we get to that point. Before we create guides, though, let's first take a look at Master Pages and Affinity and how they can help us work more efficiently when creating layouts. They're going to play an integral role in setting up guides using the templates that we just downloaded. I'll see you in the next video. 4. Master Pages in Affinity: Master Pages allow you to create set layouts with multiple types of elements such as picture and text frames, shapes, tables, and more, and apply them to groups of content pages all at once. They also give us the base for data emerges and allow us to apply similar guides and margins across a selection of pages. While they aren't always necessary, they give a distinct advantage when you want to create a multi page layout like a calendar quickly and efficiently. Let's take a look, starting with the panel interface. Master Pages can be found in the pages panel, which is a default panel in the layout studio and can be added to any other studio both default and custom. Master Pages are going to allow you to create a layout once and apply it to one or more content pages. While a single master page can be tied to multiple content pages, creating a common layout, you can add additional layers to those content pages to set them apart from one another. Master Pages just makes it easier and therefore more efficient to create any common layout elements one time and apply it across multiple pages. This is the calendar I'll be creating in this class, and you can see that I have a few different master pages set up here at the top. To for the front and back covers, one for the inner photo, and then two for the monthly grids, one for a Sunday start calendar, and the other for a Monday start calendar. These are all set layouts that I've only had to create once and then apply to the content pages at the bottom here. Once the data merge is run, all of the content that you see here is going to flow into the merge document. Before we dive more deeply into how master pages work, let's look at the overall panel layout. The pages panel is broken down into two windows, master pages, and then the content pages at the bottom. Both windows can be collapsed for additional space, and you can also drag the middle bar here up and down to provide more space for either window. You can change the size of your thumbnails up here in the drop down menu. You have a choice between small, medium, large, and extra large thumbnails. When you have extra large thumbnails selected, the more you drag out the panel, the larger the thumbnails will become. As you drag in, they'll become smaller, but they're always going to remain a single column. Large, medium and small thumbnails are always going to remain the same size regardless of how much you drag the window out. However, dragging out, we'll stack them in an array, which comes in handy when you have a large number of pages that you want to select or move around while seeing all of the others. To toggle between pages on the panel, whether it's a master or a content page, you want to fast double click on the page, and you'll see a gray line appear around the selected page. Now, it's important that you actively select the page that you want to work on. Watch what happens if I single click on this page. I still have this front cover master page in my pasteboard, which is completely different and you can see that gray line is still around if I were to start adding anything here, it's going to add it to the layers for this page. If I want to use this page, I need to fast double click until you see it in the pasteboard, and I have that gray line around that particular thumbnail. There are a couple of ways to create master pages. Creating a new document from scratch, you have the option of either setting up an artboard or a multi page layout which can include a master page, but you can't set up both. So right now, I have artboards toggled on. When I go down here and try and click, it doesn't allow me to turn that on. Once I toggle that off, I can go back down to multipage, and now I can set up a multi page document, which includes setting up a single default master page as well. If you set up a document without setting up a default master and you change your mind, you can simply click on this icon to add one. It's going to allow you to name it, set the parameters, and click Okay. Once you do this, you do need to tie that new master page to any existing content pages that it applies to. It's not automatically going to do that. You've already added content to your content page, but you'd rather have it in the Master page that you just created, you can cut it from the content page. I'm going to Command or Control X to remove it. I'll double click into the Master page and I can command or Control V to paste it. If you don't have the content pages tied to that master page already, you can see that it's not flowing in. Going to right click Choose apply Master. I'll make sure that cover is selected and click Okay. And then once I do that, that content's going to flow into that connected page. If you add a Master page during setup, it's going to show up as Master A, and all content pages are going to have that master applied to it by default. If you create more than one master page, you can selectively apply them to your content pages. So let's say I create another one that is background and I want it to apply to page two, I can right click on page two. Choose apply Master, go to the drop down and choose background. And anything I add to this master page is going to flow into page two automatically. You can name a Master page when you add it here in the dialog box, or you can name it in place in the panel itself. To do that, you want to slow click twice on the Master page name. So I'm going to click once, wait to beat, click again, and it's going to allow me to change it. Remember, fast DoubleClick is going to change the page. So let's say that I'm here on page one and I want to change the name for the Master page. If I fast double click on this, it's just going to select the page. It's not going to allow me to rename it. So I need to click, wait to beat, click again. The other option is to right click on it. Choose spread properties, and that dialog box will come up, so you can change the name there. Now, it's important to note you can only rename master pages, not content pages. They are always going to be page one, two, three, and so on. When you want to add more master pages, you can simply add one with a first icon or you can select one and choose duplicate. When you add one from scratch, remember that dialogue box is going to pop up allowing you to select options for your master pages, again, including the name. I do want to note that something is missing here, and that's because of the way the document is set up. This document is not set up with facing pages. In other words, side by side spreads or top to bottom spreads. It's actually set up as an ambidextrous document. So if I click on my move tool and I open up document setup, you can see that facing pages is toggled off. That means is I don't have the option when I click here to add a facing page Master page. Let me take you to this one here. So this one, if I go into Document Setup, is set up with facing pages, and you can see that here. I have two side by side pages. If I wanted to add a two page master page for this, I could go up to the top here. And because that's how the document is set up, you can see that I have another option here, page layout, and I can either choose Ambidextros, which again is a single page or facing pages. And when I click Okay, it's going to add that. To add contanPages, you can either use the icon at the top or select an existing page and choose duplicate. If you're adding a new page, select the page where you want to insert a new one. So I'm going to select pages 2 and 3. I'll just drag across. I'm going to choose plus, and it's going to ask me where I want to insert it. So I want two pages that I want to insert after page three. I'll click Okay, and it's going to add a two page spread there. Can reorder content and master pages simply by dragging them. So if I drag this one up, you can see that green line shows up there. When I release, it's going to move that order. Sometimes it helps to have them pulled out and have your thumbnails set to large, medium, or small because you can see them a little bit more easily. And you can do the same thing with master pages as well. Let's talk about how master pages work. These are texture digital papers that I created here in Affinity, and right now, all of them are tied to this first master page, which has a textured off white background. On the content pages themselves, I've added tables to these to create the paper look, but everything in the background is based on this master page. I have two other master pages here, one with yellow and one with Beige. Let's say that I want to create some additional pages, but using the background of the yellow one. I don't have to duplicate these and then go one by one through each page. What I can do is just select my pages. I can duplicate them, and then I'll select what I just created. I want to select page 12, hold down Shift and select the rest. And then I can right click with those selected, choose Apply Master. And then choose yellow, and it's automatically going to apply to all of those duplicates. One of the great things about working with master pages is that any changes that I make to the master page are automatically going to be applied to the pages tied to them. So let's say that I want to change this yellow to something else. I'm going to double click to select the yellow, and I want to go into the layers and make sure that I have the yellow rectangle selected. I don't want to choose this one that's my texture. So I'm going to select the yellow rectangle, and let's say that I just want these to be pink. When I go back to my pages, you can see that it's automatically applied, the pink, I still have the texture, and all of my tables are in place making up the various digital papers. In addition to write cooking on a content page and choosing apply Master, you can also drop and drag to change the master for a single content page, and this works two ways. I'm going to select page 16 here, and let's say that I want to swap out the pink background for the beige. I can drag this down over the thumbnail and release, and it's automatically going to change it. Or I can drag it over the pasteboard, and I actually get a preview, so that allows me to see what it's going to look like. If I choose not to do it and I pull it back out, it stays the way that it was. But if I pull it in and release, it's going to change it here in the panel. Now, I can also use the master pages to apply margins to my content pages, as well. And where this comes in handy is when I'm creating content pages for my calendar and want to set margins based on the type of page that I'm creating. So for this calendar, I created red guides for the print zone, according to the template I received from my print on demand company. For the blue guides, that's my safe zone. So anything like text and images that I don't want to get cut off. Because this is on my Master page, if I double click into to the content page that's tied to that, you can see those margins flowed into that. So I don't have to set up a margin for each content page. I can just do it right on the Master page, and it's going to flow into any content pages applied to that. Another benefit of doing it this way is that if any of the margins are different, you can simply set up a different master page to apply that. So here, for the inner photo, everything is flipped because the coils are on the bottom, the margins are slightly different. So I was very easily able to apply different margins to my inner photo page than the rest. These are just a few examples of how master pages can be beneficial when you're setting up a layout. You only have to create it one time and you can be assured that it's going to be consistent across the pages that you've tied to that particular master. Now, for this lesson, I've kept everything pretty high level. But in upcoming classes, I'm going to do a much deeper dive into more complex uses for master pages, especially when it comes to creating things like digital planners. We're going to talk more about master pages as we go through the class, but for now, let's head into an actual document and talk about setting up grids and guides for our calendars. I'll see you there. 5. Setting Up Guides: When creating guides for your calendars, using a template from your print on demand company to set up guides will ensure you're staying within print guidelines and won't end up with any unwanted surprises. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can use Master Pages to set up margins and guides that carry through to any content pages tied to them, making it an efficient way to set yourself up for a successful print. Let's take a look. There are a couple of options when creating the document for your calendar. You can start with a fresh document from the home screen and pull in a template for the guides or open the template directly in Affinity and go from there. If you choose to start with a fresh document, you can set margins and bleeds from within this dialogue box. But when I'm creating a new document from scratch, I tend to leave those options blank. By waiting until my new document is open to set the margins and guides, I can set everything up on the master page. Typically, though, if I already have a template to work with, it's just as easy to open the template directly in Affinity and work from there. An additional advantage of doing it this way is that most templates are set up with the correct color space, which isn't always the same between companies. For example, Printify who I'm using here, asks for RGB. While Gelato who created my other calendars requires CMYK. Of course, you can set color space from here in the document dialogue. I just find it easier to start with the template and go from there because I know I'm setting up exactly what the selected print on demand company needs. Case of my template, it's first broken out by size and then broken into four separate pages, the front and back covers, and two inner pages, one for the image, and one for the grid. Now, if yours is multiple pages, don't assume that the guides are all going to be the same, especially when dealing with something like this. It has a coil and a hole for hanging. In my case, the placement of the coils and the hole for the inner photopage are different than the other three. Therefore, the guides themselves are different. I'm going to start by opening the front page template, so I'm choosing the 11.5 by 14 front cover, and I'll click Open. The first thing you'll notice is that it opened it up as a content page with no Master page. So that's what I'm going to start with. I'll go up to the top here and I'm going to click on Add Master. I'll call this front cover. The size is based on the template that I pulled in, so I'm just going to click Okay. Now, I want to move the template from the content page to the Master page. So I'm going to double click into the content page. Go to the layers, and I'm going to cut it with a Commander Control X. I'll head back to the Master page again with a double click and then Command or Control V to paste it. Now, remember, if you add a Master page after you create your document, any content pages in place aren't automatically tied. So I need to tie this to this master page. I'm going to right click on it, choose apply Master. You can see there's the front cover, and I'll click Okay, and as soon as I do that, the guides are going to flow into that page. I also want to set up another master page to pull in the template for my inner photo page because remember, my guides for that are going to be different. So I'll go up to the top and once again, choose New Master, and I'm going to call this inner photo. I'll click Okay. And this time I'm going to use the Place Tool to add it. You can see it's blank. I'll go to the Place Tool. It's standard in the layout studio. I click on Place, and I want to choose this 11.5 by 14 month, and I'll click Open. Now, because this is based on the template, all I have to do is click, and it's going to add the exact size of the template, and I'll just center it up. Once that's in place, I'll add a content page for it. So I'm just going to click on ad pages. I want to choose the master page for the inner photo, and I'll click Okay. Now, once all of my guides are in place, I'm going to use duplicates of the front cover for the back cover and monthly grids because the guides are the same. But for now, I'm going to stick with these two master pages and add guides starting with the front cover. I'm going to double click into the front cover Master page. I want to add all of my guides to the master pages, not the content pages, and I'm just going to temporarily click on that to close it so I have more room. For this template, the red mine on the outside is the full document size that needs to be uploaded, so I need to make sure that my design goes all the way to the edges of my canvas. Solid line just next to that is the print zone. While the design itself has to go to the edges of the document, the actual print area is within that space. Now, whenever you're working with something printed, like a calendar or a professionally printed image, there's always a margin of error when it comes to the cut, and that leads us to the last zone. The area within the dashed line is the safe zone. So anything that I don't want to lose when the calendar is cut needs to stay within the dashed line. We're talking about text, important parts of an image, and the grids for the calendars themselves. Anything outside of that gray area is considered the bleat, which means content that could potentially get cut. The likelihood of it being cut that much is very, very slim. But you're always better off keeping everything important inside of the safe zone just in case. While we're making sure that our design goes to the edges of the canvas to avoid any unprinted areas, it doesn't mean visible content has to be pulled to the edges. In my case, my calendar grades, the month and the year, are all going to stay within the safe zone, and I'm going to add an off white background behind them, and that's what goes to the edge of the canvas. Now, my images will be pulled to the edge of the canvas, but any important parts that I don't want getting cropped are all going to stay within the safe zone. Set up my guides, I'm going to use margins for the print zone and guides for the safe zone. Again, I don't need anything for the edge because that's the actual edge of my canvas. I'm going to start with the outside print zone. This template doesn't have any information on the exact settings for a margin. But if I zoom in really close to the guide, I'm just going to zoom in here. You can see that I get a grid, and that's going to give me something to snap to. Now, it looks like the center is right about there. I have nine cells across, so about 4.5 would be where I want to place the margin. I'm going to check that before I start by pulling in one of the guides first. Now, if you don't see your rulers here at the top, you can go to view show and choose rulers or you can command or control R. I'm just going to drag a guide in, and I'm going to first snap it to here, which is 42 pixels and snap it to the second one, which is 43. So halfway between those two is 42.5 pixels, and that's what I want to set my margin to. I'm going to hover over that guide and just drag it off. I don't need it anymore. And I'll go up to view again down to margins and guides. I want to key a margin in here, but first I want to change the color. The guides and the margins right now are by default, the same color, and I want to differentiate them. So I'm going to change this one to red. Now I have this locked, which means anything that I key into one is automatically going to get applied to the rest, which is exactly what I want because the margins are the same all the way around. So I'll just key in 42.5 and hit tab. And if I close that, I'll go to the layers and turn this off and you can see there's my margin. The next thing that I want to add is the safe zone. So again, I'm going to zoom in really close so I get that grid. I actually want to keep this on the inside of the safe zone. I'd be fine putting it in the middle, but just to play it safe, I'm actually going to snap it to about here. Now, this time, I am going to use guides, not margins. So I'm just going to drag this in, and I'll snap it to about there. And I want to do that all the way around. So I'm just going to back out. I'm going to focus right here. And wherever you hover your cursor, when you zoom in, that's where it's going to zoom in too. So again, I'm just going to pull it to the edge of that black line there, and I'll do that all the way around. Before I move on to the master page for the inner photo, one last thing I want to add here is a guide for the whole. It's inevitable that the hole is going to end up cutting into the image page, but having a guiding place is going to allow me to set my image so that nothing important is being cut off by the hole. The same goes with the monthly grids. So I'm going to temporarily place an ellipse shape that bumps up to that dash line and then remove it before I export for print, because it's important to note margins and guides don't print the whole wheel unless you remove it. So I'm just going to grab the ellipse shape, and I just have a red color selected here just so that I remember it. And with command or control shift held down, I'm just going to drag that hole. Next, I'm going to double click into the master page for the inner photo, and I want to do the same thing. Now, the margins are really easy. I just need to go up to the top to view margins and guides. Again, I'm going to make this a red color and changes to 42.5. The margins are exactly the same. The difference comes in with the actual guides. Because the coils are down here, you can see that this margin is a lot deeper than this one, and it's flipped from what it was for the front page. So I just need to set them a little bit differently. I'm going to zoom in here, and again, I'll pull a margin or I'm sorry, a guide down, snap it into place. Now while I'm here, I can do the ellipse for the whole, as well. I'll command or Control Shift, and I'm just going to drag that up to there. And then I'm going to place the rest of the guides around the Master page. With that done, I'm going to duplicate the Master page for the front cover twice and relabel one to back cover and the other to monthly Grid. I'll select the front cover and choose duplicate. I'm going to do that twice. And for this one, I'm going to change it to back cover. I'll click, wait for a beat and click again, and I'm going to change this to back cover, and this is going to be a monthly grid. Now, you don't have to reorder your master pages if you don't want to. I prefer to keep mine in the order of my calendar. So I'm going to take the back cover and move it to the end and take the inner photo and move it after the front cover. So I have front cover, inner photo, monthly grid, and back cover. One final thing that I want to do before I create my content pages is to make a slight adjustment to the guides on the monthly grid. I want to make sure that no part of the table that I have in place for the calendar is cut off. Well, the print zone is technically well outside of the safe zone, and it should be fine. Just to play it safe, I'm going to bring the two vertical guides in 25 pixels. So with my move tool selected, I'm going to hover over one of them until I get that double hero. I'll double click, and that's going to pull up the Margins and Guides dialogue. So for this one, I'm going to just click into there, and I'll go to the right and key in plus 25, and that's going to move that to the right, 25 pixels. I'll click into here, and this one is going to be -25. You can see the one on the right moved left, 25 pixels. Now, I haven't decided if I want the bottom of my calendar to be above the whole or not. I'm going to leave this as is. Before I do the final data merge, I always do a double check of everything before the merge, and I'll decide then if I want to change that. But for now, I'm going to leave this alone. With all of my master pages in place, I want to make sure that I have content pages set up and tied to them. So my front covers all set. For the inner photo, even though I'm going to end up with 12 photo pages, I'm going to be using data merge to add them, which means I only need to add one here. I'm going to set up one for the monthly grid. Now, I do plan on creating a Sunday and a Monday start. So ultimately, I'm going to end up with two content pages, but I'm going to create everything for the one so that I can just duplicate it into the other. That's a lot faster. So I'll go ahead and click Okay. And then finally, I want one for the back cover. Now that our guides and content pages are in place, it's time to start adding the placeholders for our data merge, starting with picture frames. I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Picture Frames in Affinity: Picture frames create a drop zone for content, usually an image either from an external source or the stock studio. In addition to images, you can pull in a PDF, an Affinity document, and even in design document. They come in handy in layout situations like magazines, books, calendars and other scenarios. They're also an important placeholder when using data merge to pull in bulk images. There are two built in picture frames that are standard in the layout studio, but they can be pulled into the other default studios, as well as those you create yourself. Frames are created the same way that shapes are. You can select the frame tool of your choice and either drag one out or with the tool selected, Command or Control click on your canvas and key in the width and height. When dragging out a frame, you can use keyboard modifiers to control the aspect ratio of the frame. Holding down shift while you drag is going to create a perfect square or ellipse. Shift and command or control is going to create a perfect square or ellipse from the center of the frame. Command or control by itself is still going to create the frame from the center, but allow you to control the overall aspect ratio of the frame. Holding down the space bar is going to allow you to move it around before you place it. Holding down Shift and the space bar will allow you to move it at specific increments. Just like shapes, holding down the mouse key and then using your arrow keys to tap will add an array of frames either side to side or top to bottom. Holding down the arrow keys is going to help you create space between those frames. In addition to creating an array of frames using the arrow keys, you can also use the move duplicate dialog box to create duplicates and move them either horizontally or vertically. So I'm going to hit Duplicate on this. I'm going to move it 550 pixels and create a total of five frames. I can go ahead and move these over and with them selected, go the other direction. 550 pixels. Going to hit Duplicate and create a total of five. Once a picture frame is in place, it's going to have an X inside of the shape, and you'll also see a named picture frame in your layer stack. And if you hover over the icon, it's also going to label it as a picture frame. In addition to built in frames, you can create custom frames from any shape, both built in shapes and those you create with the pen, pencil, or bla brush, as well as text. I'm just going to hit P on my keyboard to select the pentel and just tap out a shape. And I'll go ahead and complete it. Click that last node. If I right click on the shape, I can go down to the bottom and choose Convert to picture frames, or I can go up to the top here and choose layer convert to picture frame. And you can see it gets the X in the center. So now it acts as a frame. If I want, I can add a stroke to this just like any other curve. So right now there's black selected for the stroke, but it's set to zero. So I'm just going to drag up on the stroke up here, and you can see that in addition to the frame, I also have that stroke. I can go into the stroke panel and I can change this to a dashed or dotted line. I can also use the path brushes to create a textured stroke around the edges of the frames. I'm not going to be creating custom picture frames in this class, but do know that it's an option if you want to use those for your calendar. Let's take a quick look at how picture frames work. I'm going to select the elliptical picture frame, pull down Shift and commander control. Now, it still has that stroke on it, so I'm just going to go into the Stroke Studio and turn that off. But you can see I have the X in the center, which makes it a picture frame. I'm going to go to the stock Studio and pull in this flower picture. So you can see all I needed to do was just drag it from the stock studio and drop it, and now it's in the frame. If I go to my layers and I toggle this open, you can see that there's the picture frame, and I have a child layer, which is the actual image. That's the image clipped inside of the picture frame. This is a non destructive tool, which means that I can swap images out or delete them easily without losing the original frame. In order to use the tools that are built on the frame, I need to have that layer selected. So if I have her over here, you can see that I have a handle that allows me to move the image around. I can additionally use the slider here at the bottom. To scale it up and down. In addition to this handle, I can double click in, and it's going to automatically select the image itself, and I can move it around that way as well. To change an image, you can either drag something else in from the stock studio. You can use the Place Image tool. You can pull something in from your files, or you can go up to the contextual menu and choose replace Image. Let's take a look at the rest of the contextual menu. Properties are going to allow you to set the aspect ratio of your image in relation to your picture frame. So scale to max fit is going to scale the image up to fill the frame. However, that may end up cropping your photo. So you can see here at the bottom, I have a little bit of my background showing. I can use the handle to move this around until I no longer see that. Scale to minimum fit is going to maintain the aspect ratio of the image and not crop it, but it may not fill the entire frame like it's doing here. Stretch is going to stretch the image to fill the frame. Therefore, the aspect ratio may not be maintained, and you may get some warping like I have here. Then the final option none means there's going to be no scaling. I tend to leave all of my images set to none and use handles and sliders on the tool to scale images as I just find they have more control over it. One additional handle I want to show you on the tool is this one at the bottom right. If you use this outer handle, you can maintain the aspect ratio of the frame and scale the image with it. The exception to that is if you hold the space bar down while you do it, it's actually going to lock that child layer. And while you can maintain the aspect ratio of the frame and scale it up and down, the image is going to stay where it is. Same thing will happen if you toggle on lock children in the contextual menu. Without any keyboard modifiers, if that's toggled on, you can see that that child layer is going to lock and only the frame is going to scale up and down. So if you want this handle to work the way it's intended, make sure you don't have the space bar held down and lock children is toggled off. You can also change the frame by using the inner handle here. If I hold down shift, it's going to maintain the aspect ratio. If I hold down command or control shift, it's going to maintain the aspect ratio and scale from the center. If you want to set a frame to a specific aspect ratio, you can also use the Transform panel to do that. So let's say that I want to create placeholders for the thumbnails on my back page of my calendar, and I want them to specifically have a four or five ratio. I can do that right here with the Transform panel. The first thing I'm going to do is make sure that the aspect ratio is unlocked. I only want to change the height and not the width. I'll go ahead and click into the height. And what I want to key in is W, which is width divided by four asterisk five, and that's four or five ratio. And if I tab out of that, you can see the top and the bottom moved in, and now I have a four or five ratio image. So let's say that I wanted a three, four, I could go ahead into height. And again, I'll do width divided by three asterisk four, and it's going to move the top and the bottom back up. And the reason it's doing evenly on the top and the bottom is because I have this set to the center. Another way you can change the size of the frame is scale to fit the image that you bring in rather than the other way around. So let's go back to the contextual menu here. I'm going to click on size picture frame to content, and if I scale out. You can see this picture was rather large. So the frame itself is rather large. I can scale this down to fit it. And now the aspect ratio is maintained for that image. So this image was tall rather than wide, and now the frame matches it exactly. In addition to the front cover and inner photo, I want to add a grid of picture frames on the back cover so that I can add thumbnails of the photos inside. Before I do that, I'm going to add an off white rectangle as a background because I'm not adding a full image to this page. Remember, the design needs to go to the edges of the canvas. I'll select my rectangle tool, and I have an off white fill with no stroke. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle that covers the entire canvas. I'll drag it down to the bottom of the layer stack. And then toggle on lock just to make sure it stays in place. I want to add thumbnails that will only show what doesn't get cut off in the print process. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I want it to be pretty close. To get the right aspect ratio, I'm going to start by creating a picture frame using the print sona as my guide, so the area between the margins here. I have my rectangular picture frame selected, I'm going to start at the top left and just drag down to the bottom right. And having snapping on makes that a whole lot easier. If you don't already have it on, just turn on up here at the top. With that in place, I'm going to scale it down to about 900 pixels wide. I want to add four frames across with 100 pixels of space between each frame, and then three rows down with 200 pixels of space between each row so that I can add labels for my months. If I need to, I can always change it. With the picture frame selected, I'm going to go down to my Transform panel. And I want to make sure that the aspect ratio is locked so that the height shifts when I change the width. I'll go ahead and key in 900 and then I'm just going to drag this out of the corner. I don't need to place it perfectly yet. I'm going to create all of the frames, and then I'll center them up. I'm going to use the move duplicate dialogue to add the rest of my frames quickly and with even spacing. But I need to do that in such a way that my layers run bottom up. So the picture frame for January is going to be on the bottom of the layer stack, and the one for December will be at the very top. The reason for this is later in the class, I'll be using autoflow to quickly add my 12 images to the frames, and they need to be in bottom up order for that to work perfectly. We'll talk more about that in the upcoming lesson. I'll start by creating my first row. Again, I want 100 pixels of space between each frame horizontally. I'm going to hit Enter, and I'll key in 1,000. So that's 900 wide plus 100. I'm going to tab over, and then I'm just going to turn on duplicate. I want the number of copies to be three because I already have one in place. And I need to make sure that insert new items in front is on. That way, they'll be added above the first frame. I'll click Okay, and there you can see they're added in my layer stack. Once those are in place, I'm going to select all four frames, and I want to temporarily group them up using Command or Control G. By grouping these up, I can control exactly where they'll end up in the layer stack as I duplicate them. Once again, I'm going to use the move duplicate dialog. I'll hit Enter. And this time, I'm going to go on the vertical. Now, the height of this is 738.9 pixels. So I'll start by keying that in. And I want to add 200 pixels for my space. So I'll hit plus 200 and hit Tab. I'll toggle on duplicate. And this time, I only need two additional copies. Again, I want to make sure that the insertion mode is insert new items in front. And I'll click Okay. Before I ungroup these, I want to center them up on the page. Go to leave enough space for my headers at the top and then some space at the bottom for copyright information. So I think that's good right there. I'm going to right click and choose Ungroup A. And when I go to my layer stack, you can see when I click on this bottom one, that's the January frame. If I click on the top one, there's December, and it's going to go in the order that I need for the autoflow later. Now that we have a handle on creating picture frames, let's take a look at another important placeholder frame, the text frame. I'll see you in the next video. 7. Frame & Artistic Text in Affinity: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the two types of text tools in Affinity, frame and artistic. We'll talk about the differences between the two, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of both. Let's take a look. There are two main text tools in Affinity, artistic and frame. Can both be found in all of the default studios and can be added to custom studios that you create yourself. While both allow you to create text, and their contextual menus are the same, there are different use cases for them. Let's start with the artistic text tool. This is what I would call a one and done tool. You're going to select the tool, create your text, and move on. It's great for creating titles, a single word, or a phrase. But it doesn't act as a placeholder for text, so we're not going to use this for our data merge. Create text, you can click on the Canvas, and it's going to add your cursor at whatever size is set up here in the textual menu. The same goes for the font. The first time you use it in a document, when you click the font and font size will be whatever you have set as your default. After that, it's whatever you've used last. Can also drag out to set the size of your cursor. Again, it's going to use whatever font you use last unless it's the first time you're using the tool in the canvas, in which case, it will use the default. Once you have text in place, you can make changes to it up here in the contextual menu or used text styles, which we'll talk about in the next lesson. We'll be using the frame text tool in this class, specifically to create the placeholders for data merge for our month and year, the days of the week, and any headers and sub headers on the front and back pages. The frame text tool allows you to create a drop zone for text, whether it's a single word, a phrase, or a paragraph. It's especially helpful when using data merge because it gives the data merge elements a place to land once the merge is generated. Use the tool, just start by dragging out a frame. And when I deselect this, you can see that I get this line around it. That's a guide as to where the frame is. If you're unable to see your frame when it's deselected, go up to the top to view down to show and choose text flow. And that's going to add that faint line around it, but it won't print on the final document. I'm going to right, click on this and insert some filler text. Unlike the artistic text tool, the scale of the final frame doesn't determine the scale of your text. The first time you drag out a text frame in a document, it's going to have your default font settings applied. Go to right click and choose Expand field, and that's going to allow me to edit individual words or phrases in my filler text. This only applies to filler text, not text you create yourself. You can edit your own text immediately without having to expand it. To change individual words, click somewhere within the word that you want to change. So I'm going to click right here. And I can go up to the contextual menu at the top and change just that word. To change several words within a text frame, select the words that you want to change, and once again, you can make changes to the font. You can change the size of the font. You can also use a textile just on those words. If you select the frame itself, so I have my move tool selected, I'm going to click and select it. You can make changes to the entire frame, and it's always going to remember the last one used. Again, in the next lesson, we'll be talking about text styles, which can also be used to quickly change the font as well as other attributes of a single text frame, as well as a group of them. One thing to note is that frames don't automatically expand to fit any overflow of text. So I always prefer drag out a little bit more than I expect to need. That's important to remember when you're creating placeholders for your data emerges. Example, for the months on my calendar, May would need much smaller frame than November, but since it won't automatically adjust with each month, I'm going to create a frame that's going to accommodate all months regardless of length. It's easily fixable once you run your data merge. If you don't do that. It's just something to keep in mind. Let's look at what happens when text overflows your frame. Typed out a few sentences here, and you can see that part of it is getting cut off after the word Hue. If I select the frame, you can see that I have this eyeball here. And that means there is text overflow, and Affinity is currently hiding anything that's outside the bounds of the frame. If I click to turn that off, you can see that's where the overflow went. I can hide it again by clicking on the eyeball. I want all of my text to be in a single frame, there are a few ways that I can adjust this. I can, of course, adjust the font size to bring everything into a single line. I can pull down until all lines show, and you can notice that the eyeball has disappeared. I can also pull the text frame out to the side and it adjusts the placement of it so that you can see the entire thing. With this selected, you may notice another handle down here at the bottom right, and this is very similar to the picture frame handle. If I drag this out, it's going to scale the text frame. It's going to keep the aspect ratio, but it's going to scale it up and down, and you can see that my text is going to scale with it. If I drag this inner one, though, of course, it's not going to scale the text. It's going to adjust only the frame. In addition to changing the font, you can also change the alignment, the letting of the paragraph, the color of the frame, both stroke and fill, as well as make a number of other adjustments, either by using the contextual menu here or clicking on the text frame icon, which will pull up the text frame panel. I don't keep my text frame panel open standardly, just as a default because I know that when I have a text frame selected, I can always click here and open it up. We'll be using the text frame tool to create our frames. You can also create a frame from a custom shape. I'm going to go to my shape tool here and just grab the Cloud tool, and I'll drag out sort of a flower shape here. If I right click on it, I can convert it to a text frame. I can also go up to the menu at the top, go to layer, convert, and convert to text frame. From there, you can format the text the same as any other text frame. One thing I want to note, if you want to change the color of the frame, you wouldn't do it here in the swatches panel, you would need to go to the text frame panel. And right here, you can see I can change the fill color of my frame. I can add a stroke if I want. So let's just turn that on. I can make it a dash stroke, but I need to do everything from within the text frame panel, not the swatches panel. One last thing I want to show you is how you can create a multi column text frame. Now, this is something that would be handy in publication, like a magazine, something that has multiple columns. We're going to use it for our days of the week on our monthly grids. To create a multi text frame, just drag out a frame to start. So I'm going to drag that out to about there. I think that would fit days of the week nicely. Go up to the contextual menu at the top, you can see an option to choose the number of columns. The default is one. I'm going to set that to seven for seven days of the week. Now you can see that it took the frame that I created and it broke it into columns within that frame. If I want it to stretch out, I'm just going to drag this out. And I'll drag it to about here on this side. And I have a little bit more space here, but you can see that I have gutters here in between each one, and that's this number here. If I want to change the gutter width, I can bring it up or I can bring it down. I'm actually going to change it to zero, so there's no space between each one, and I could easily add my days of the week here. Can format a multi column text frame just like a single text frame. But case alignment is going to happen within each individual column. If I'm clicked into the text frame, the same goes for adding a textile. If I want all columns to be centered vertically and horizontally, I'll select the entire frame, go up to the top, and I can change my alignment options. I can change the font, I can change the text style, and everything will have the same one set for them. So if I click in here, if I hit Return or Enter, you can see it's tabbing between each and they're centered vertically and horizontally. I want a single column within the multi column frame to have a different alignment or textyle, I would click into it and change it. Let's bring it. So you can see this one's on the left now, but if I click into this one, it's still in the center. Every other column is going to be left alone. We'll be revisiting the frame text tool as we set up our calendars for the data merge. But for now, let's head into the next lesson and talk about character and paragraph styles. I'll see you there. 8. Text Styles in Affinity: Textiles offer you one of the most efficient ways to not only format text throughout your project, but easily adjust it later if needed. In this lesson, we're going to first take a look at the textiles panel and then talk about the difference between the various formatting options. Let's get started. Textiles allow you to add attributes to your text and create a preset of sorts. So this could be the font, the size of the font, the alignment or spacing, among other attributes. Styles can be modified at any time to quickly adjust any text that it's applied to, whether it's an artistic text, text frame, or a group of text frames. And it all depends on what type of style you're using. Before we get into the types of textiles, let's first take a look at the textiles panel itself. This is a default panel in the layout studio, but it can be added to any other studio, both default and custom. If you don't see it in the panel that you're in, go to window down to text and choose text styles. You can leave it free floating or dock the panel. It's all up to you. The first time you open the panel in a new document, you'll see a number of built in textiles already in place. I actually like to delete these because honestly, I find it easier and cleaner to build my own styles rather than edit those already in place. Also like to save my calendar templates with no styles in place. So when I create a new calendar from a template, it opens with the defaults, and I can start fresh with the textiles that I've set up. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. In order to cleanly delete all of the default styles, I need to erase these before I add any text. I'm going to go up to the carrot at the top here and choose delete unused styles, and that's going to leave me with two no styles styles. One is a paragraph style, the others character style. There are actually three types of textiles, paragraph, character, and group. So let's start with group because this type doesn't actually get applied to text. It works as a container for the other two types of textiles. They aren't required, but you can use them to save textiles for use in other documents. And I'm going to show you how to do that later in the lesson. I can just go to the bottom here and click on group style. And I'll just name this the Mordent. That's actually the font that I'm going to be using for my calendar. And that's all that I need to do with this group style. I can click Okay. Paragraph styles define the properties of a paragraph as a whole, not just a single word. Let me show you on this text frame that I have some filler text in. I've gone ahead and set up two styles. One is a paragraph style, the other is character style. I've used the same font and size, so they look identical when applied. If I click into a word within a paragraph and I apply the Mordent paragraph style, it's going to apply the style to the entire paragraph because, again, I've chosen that particular style. Character styles define individual words and sentences inside of the paragraph. So if I click inside of a word here and I go ahead and choose the character style, it's the same exact font and size, but it's only applied to the word. The same goes for a combination of words that I might choose, so a full sentence. I'll just choose this here and choose character, and I can just change those that I selected. As an aside, if I simply select the text frame itself and don't click into a specific word, whether I choose paragraph or character style, it's going to apply to the entire text frame. If I want to bring that back to the default setting, I can click on No style, and it'll bring it back to the default that I have set for the app. I tend to create all of my styles as paragraph styles, but if you're creating something with a great deal of text like a book or a magazine spread, being able to apply a style to a word rather than an entire paragraph can come in handy. Before we get into creating textiles, though, let's talk about local formatting first. In addition to using styles, you can format your text by using the formatting options up here at the top, even if you've already applied a textile to it. Just like the artistic textol, this is one and done. If I don't save this as a style, later on, I would either have to remember the settings that I used or use the style picker tool to sample attributes from one piece of text and apply it to another. And that can be time consuming. When it comes to something more extensive like a planner, it's a good idea to create a set of styles upfront that you can easily apply across the project. For consistency and efficiency. So let's talk about creating paragraph and character styles. I have two text frames here, and I want to use them to show you how you can create a textile from a text frame, as well as go the opposite direction and create it right inside the text styles panel. So just like previously, I deleted all of my unused styles, so I'm left with the two default no style styles. My two text frames are completely unaltered. The font and font scale are default aerial 12 point and the alignment is top left. Before I create my textiles, I'm going to start by creating a group. So again, I'll just create a group called the mordent and then that's it. I'll leave this as is. To create a textile from a text frame, I'm going to select the frame itself, not a specific word, and I'm going to set the font and the font scale. So go up to the top here, and I'm going to find the mordent choose that and regular. And I want to set this to 18 point. Also going to set my alignment to center, so I'll go up to the top here, and I'm just going to click on this, and it's going to center that up. Now, vertical alignment, so top to bottom is not a paragraph or character attribute. It's a text frame attribute, so it's not going to get captured in a text style. I'm actually going to center that here, but just keep in mind when you're setting up your text frames as placeholders, if you want them to be vertically aligned, set that up when you set up the text frame itself or update it after the fact. This in place, I'm ready to set up the textyle. Again, I have a choice between paragraph and character styles, and aside from how they're applied, the only difference between the two is that paragraph styles have more options. With the text frame selected, I'm going to start by clicking on character style because I want to show you the difference. Under style name, I'm just going to call this mordant. I could call it header, medium header, whatever I want to do. We'll do more of this later in this lesson. Going to base it on the group that I added, so I'll click on based on and choose the mordant. And you can see here it shows type character. On the left here, you can see the options I have. So font color position, and more. Now, if I go to font, the font style and size are already selected because I'm using a text frame to set this. I don't need to change anything. One thing that you won't see here when using the character style is the alignment. So even though I chose central alignment, there's no option for that here, but watch what happens when I go back to style and change this to paragraph. If I go under paragraph or under paragraph spacing, I have alignment right there. Now, it says no change because it's already in place. But if I click on the dropdown, you can see that I can set this to whatever I want. Those are the only two things that I want to set in my textile. So I'm going to click Okay, and you can see now I have a paragraph style called Mordent. So if I click on this text frame and choose that paragraph style, it's going to apply the font, the font scale and the center alignment. Again, remember, vertical alignment isn't part of that, so I would actually need to actively change that or make sure that the text frame is already set that way. I'm going to Command or Control Z to bring that back to where it was, so I can show you how to do that in the opposite direction. I can do this without selecting the text frame first, but I actually prefer to select it first and then go to the panel to create it because it allows me to see the changes as they happen. So you can see that right now I still have the default style in here. I'm going to go right to paragraph. Again, I tend to set most of mine up as paragraph. It's still set as the default, but if I go through here and start making changes, you'll see the changes happening here. Under style, I'm going to call this mordant two because I already have mordant in place. I'm going to base it on the Mordent that's the group. It's a paragraph type for the font. Right now, it's showing the default. So I want to change this to that mordentFont regular. And I want my font scale to be 18 points. I'll go right down to space in here and I'm going to change the alignment to center. And again, I can't capture the vertical alignment. So that's all that I'm going to change right now. I'll click Okay. I do want to mention if I hadn't changed the text frame first, I would need to go back and select the text frame and then apply the text style because it's not automatically going to do that. An important note about textiles is that they're document specific, not application wide. So if I open a new document, I'm not going to be able to go back to my textiles panel and still have them in place. You can pull a previously saved document in and anything that's in that document will automatically apply to your current document. There's actually a much easier way to do that, and that's using assets. Saving your textiles as assets means you can pull a saved group into any document, and they'll automatically be applied to your textiles panel, even if you delete that group. So let me show you how I create that. The first thing I'm going to do is pull in this set of text frames, and I'm basically going to recreate the textiles that I did a little bit earlier. All this is is a group of six text frames. They're already aligned vertically and horizontally, so they're centered up both ways. And I've labeled them large header, large script, medium header, medium script days of the week and monthly grid. These are the basic textiles that I set up for any planners, calendars, notebooks, and things like that. So for the particular calendar that I'm going to be creating, I know that I don't have a script version is font, so I'm going to get rid of those, and all I need are the four remaining. So these two are going to be for any headers and subheaders. This will be for the days of the week for my monthly grid. And then this is going to be any basic text as well as the numbers on the monthly grid. Again, I can either create it from the panel itself or I can go to the text frame. I'm just going to move this over. And I'll just create it from the text frame. So I'll click on paragraph, and my style name is going to be large header. The font is going to be the mordant font, and it's going to be regular. And because this is a large header, I'm going to set it at 48. I can always change it if I want to. Again, my alignment is already set, so I don't need that. I'm not actually going to set up a group for this one. I don't think I need it. So I don't need to apply it or do it based on anything. I'll just click Okay, and there you can see I have my large header. So I'm going to select the medium header. Again, I'm going to name this the same, so medium. Header. The font also going to be the mordant font in regular. This time because it's a medium header, I'm going to choose 30, and I'll click Okay. So you can see I have it right there. Let's go the opposite direction. And this time I'm actually not going to choose the text ring. I'm going to choose the paragraph style, and you're gonna notice because I don't have this selected, it's not going to change. This was going to be days of the week. And the font, I'm going to choose this Instance story. The font scale, I'm going to set that at I think 20 points. I typically end up changing it, but I'll go with 20 for right now, and I'll click Okay. Now, again, because I didn't have this selected first, even though you can see it here, it's not applied to this. So I'll select it. Click on days of the week. Now, it didn't actually apply the center alignment, so I'm just going to click. Now, watch what happens when I do that. You can see I get this little sync button here, and that's because I made a change to the thing that I applied. The reason the center alignment didn't actually get applied is because I didn't select the text frame first. So I would have needed to manually do that, but it's fine. I've gone ahead and changed it. I'm going to go up to the top here, and if I click on this, it's going to update it. So now, anytime I use this style, the center alignment will be in place. Okay, so for my last one, I'm going to select the text frame, choose Create paragraph. Again, I want this to be smaller. So this is going to be basic text monthly grid, and the font family is going to be the Insta story, but it's going to be smaller. I'm going to go with I think 14 for right now, but again, I can always change it. Now, because I have the text frame selected and it's already center aligned, that's already in place, so I can just click Okay. So I have my four text frames here, and I want some way of knowing what I have in place when I pull them from my assets. First thing that I'm going to do is select all four, and I'm going to group them up. So I'll command or Control G, and I'm going to name the group, whatever fonts I use. So this is going to be the Mordent and Insta story. I'll go to my assets, and I have my text styles category set up. Now I'm only using two fonts here, so I'm going to put this in my font duo. I'll select the group, and I can just drag it in to my assets. It's going to do a little thinking first, and then it's going to place it right there. So let me delete this, and I'm going to take this back to deleting unused styles. Again, I'm back to the no styles styles. And let me show you how I would pull this in if I were opening up a new document. So right now, I have no styles in place. If I grab this asset and drop it, you can see that those textiles that I have here are already in my textiles panel. And even if I delete them, they'll remain. So as long as I don't go up to the top here, to delete unused styles before I begin adding text. These will stay in here and I can use them in this document. So even though textiles are document specific, if I save them to my assets, I can pull them into any new document and have them at the ready. Now that we have a handle on text frames and styles, let's head to the next lesson where we're going to create our text placeholders Master Pages. I'll see you there. 9. Adding Text Placeholders: Now that we have an understanding of how text frames and styles work, let's create placeholders for our data merge, as well as our headers and subheaders on the front and back pages. Setting up placeholders not only makes the data merge process more efficient, it means we don't have to start fresh with each calendar anytime we want to create a new. Let's take a look. I'm starting here with a front cover, but before I begin, I want to note that I haven't pulled in any text styles yet because I want to save this as a template before I do. At this point, I'm just placing text frames and adjusting their alignment. Once I open up the saved template to create a calendar, at that point, I'll pull in the textiles that I want to use for that specific calendar. That way, I'm truly starting with a fresh copy each time, and I don't have to swap anything out, which can lead to errors. I'm only placing two frames here, one for a header and one for a subheader. Now these are not going to be a part of the data merge. But by creating text frames here on the Master page, I can easily update the information on the content page once the data merge is run and then use text styles to make any aesthetic changes. I'll start with the header just drag out a nice long text frame, making sure to stay within the safe zone. Going to drag this down a little bit. Now, I need to adjust the alignment. Remember, the vertical alignment doesn't get adjusted by textiles, so I want to make sure that I do have it centered vertically. And then I'm just going to center align it horizontally. I like to put something in here just to tell myself what this is for. So I'll put insert calendar name. And I can just duplicate this to create the subheader, so I'll command or Control J to duplicate and then drag down. I'm not going to worry about changing the label here, because, again, once I run the template through the data merge, I'll adjust everything then. I might find at that point that once I add the text and the text style, I might have to adjust the size of the text frames or the placement, but for now, these are just placeholders. Going to select both of them and Command or Control C, because I'm going to use them to paste them on the back page next. Here on the back page, I'll command or Control V to paste those frames that I just copied and just drag them up to the top, middle here. And I want to use a copy of one of them to create a copyright frame down here at the bottom. Now, this doesn't have to be as big. It's going to be a much smaller text. And I want to left align this. So I'll go up to the top and left line. And this one, the text itself isn't going to change, but the text style will. I'm just going to key in copyright, Tracey Capone, photography, and Illustration, and then a date. Then finally, I'm going to add text frames for each month under the images using the same width as the frames themselves. Again, I'll grab my text frame and just start dragging out. And I think 100 pixels is actually fine. Again, I might need to adjust it once the calendar is run, but for now, this is fine. And I just wanted to center this one up between the two frames here. If you find yourself having trouble centering, even with snapping on, go up to the settings. Sometimes I find changing candidates to all layers is much more helpful when it comes to something like this. So from here, I'm going to use Move duplicate to duplicate across. I'll hit Enter. And remember, the frame is 900 pixels wide. There's 100 pixels of space between each one. So I'll just key 1,000. Click on duplicate, and then the number of copies is three. And I can manually duplicate these the rest of the way down. So I'm going to hold down Alt or option and drag down. And just play set in the center, and then I can power duplicate with Command or Control J next. Now, for right now, I think what I'm going to do is select all of these. So all of those text frames plus the picture frames. I'm going to hold Shift Down to keep them centered horizontally, but move them up slightly vertically just to give a little bit more space between the bottom, as well as bridge some of the space here. So I think that's actually good. And then finally, I'm just going to key in the months of the year. I could also use autoflow, but since I'm only doing 12 here, I'm not going to do that. It's going to take much longer to do that. One thing I didn't do, though, is center up my text. So I'm going to select all of my frames, center that up, and then I can just key in my months. And finally, I'm going to add a placeholder for the month and year, as well as a text frame for the days of the week to my monthly grid page. I'm going to start with the month and year placeholder. Now, this will be a placeholder for data merge. So this is going to get set up slightly different than the other text frames. I'll select my text frame, and I want to give myself plenty of space in case I have a longer month name or something like that. You can see it's already centered out vertically and horizontally because it remembers whatever I did last, and I had already placed sum and through them up. I want to give myself some placeholder language here, and the way that I'm going to do that is type left carat, month, right create. I want to put a space between them, and then left carat year right carat. It's important that you put the space there because data merge is not going to do it for you. So however much space you want between those two, you want to hit your space bar before you create the next one. The carats on either side indicate this is a placeholder, and that's what I'll be adding to the data merge field once I begin that process. And finally, I'm going to add a text frame with seven columns for my days of the week. I'll just drag out a text frame within the safe zone. So right now, I have a single column, and then I'll head up to the top, change this to seven. I don't want any spacing in between those. I'm going to change the gutter to zero. And I can just start typing out days of the week here. And you can just hit Enter when you're done. Sometimes you might have to hit Andrew more than once, depending on the height of your text frame. Now, I've created a Sunday start here, but I'm also going to create a Monday start calendar for those who prefer it. And this is where you have to think ahead a bit. I have a choice when it comes to creating my templates. I can either create both the Sunday start and Monday start calendar in one template and just run them as two separate data merges within a single template, or I can create two separate templates, one with the Monday start and the other with the Sunday start. Personally, I prefer to keep everything within one template. So later in the class, when we run the data merge, I'm going to show you how to set it up so that you can run two separate calendars using a single template. For now, I'm going to leave this as is and duplicate it to create the Monday start once my table and data merge layouts are in place for the grid itself. With my text frames in place, I'm going to move into the next lesson, where I'll finish off the rest of this master page with a table for the calendar itself. I'll see you there. 10. Creating the Monthly Grid Using Tables: Tables in Affinity aren't just for presenting data points. They're also a great starting point in planners and calendars for things like digital papers, daily schedules, and monthly calendar grids like we'll be creating here. In this lesson, we're going to finish off the master page for our monthly grid by adding a table that will not only act as a guide for the data merge layout tool to add in the dates, but as a background in our final printed calendar. Let's get started. I'm still in the Master page for the monthly grid, and the only thing left to create at this point is the table for the monthly spread. The table itself won't have the data merge added directly to it. You can add merge data directly to a table, but in this case, in order to get Affinity to automatically add the additional 11 pages that we need to automatically add our dates, we're going to use the data merge tool. The table that we'll be adding here is going to provide the guides for that layout, as well as the background on the final printed calendar. Select the table tool and begin to drag out a cell. I need seven columns for the days of the week. So I'm going to click on the arrows here and key in seven. Next, I need to add my rows for the weeks. I'm going to set this to six by clicking on the bottom here and keying in six. And then I want to drag the table out so that it spans the entire area left in the safe zone. So I'm going to grab my move tool and just bring this up to this corner. I'll drag this side out and then the bottom down. Before we continue, let's talk about why we need six rows and not five. Dates in these calendars are going to automatically be added by the data merge, and the placement is going to depend on the year set in the spreadsheet. In this case, 2026. We want to set this template up so that it's reusable time and again without manual intervention, which means adding a little more than we need to accommodate shifting dates each year. Order to ensure that the dates for any given month in that year are in the correct place, there needs to be a certain number of placeholders in each month. In this case, that's 42. Now the reason it's 42 and not 31, which is the most days any month is going to have is because every year, there are two or three months that start much later in the first week and therefore end in that sixth row. Those months vary year by year, so we need to take that into account. If there aren't enough placeholders on a grid to accommodate the shifts between the months, as well as the shifts between the years, I'm going to have problems with incorrect dates in my grids, and it's going to mean manual cleanup. Additionally, you have the option of including leading and trailing dates in your calendar. In other words, the days from the prior or upcoming months that fall within the same week as the first and last of that month. When you're working with a single page calendar like this where you can't see the prior or upcoming month, having leading and trailing dates can be helpful. It clearly shows what dates the first week began on, even if they're from a prior month, and what dates from the upcoming month are included in the final week of any given month. If you don't want to include leading and trailing dates, you're never going to hit 42 sales, and even if you do, it's rare. But again, in order to keep this whole process automated, I'm going to provide Affinity with more placeholders than I need rather than less. Once the data merge is run, I'll show you how to clean up each calendar quickly so that you're not left with a bunch of t boxes. This is one of those things that's going to make a lot more sense when we actually run the data merge. So if right now you're a bit confused, please don't worry. It's going to be much clearer in an upcoming lesson. So for now, let's set up our 42 cells and format the table. I mentioned earlier, while the table itself won't have data merge information added directly to it, it is going to print in the final calendar, so I do want to format it a little. Going to select the table, make sure that the table tool is selected. You can also double click it so that comes up. I'm going to select the entire table by clicking in this first cell and then dragging all the way down to the bottom right, so it's all lit up in blue. Now, once your table toool and your table are selected, you'll see options up here in the contextual menu. I want to click on this downward a carat, and you can see that this gives me all of the options for selecting areas of this table. So, for example, if I click the horizontal inside, it's going to select every horizontal inside stroke, and it's going to light it up in a double thick line. I want to start with the outline. So I'll go back up to that menu and choose outline. And now the entire outside is lit up in a bold blue line. Under the stroke settings, I'm not going to change anything but the width. I want to set this to 1.5 points, so it's a little bit thicker than the rest. Next, I'll go back to the stroke settings, and I'm going to choose inside, and you can see those all light up. And I want to change those from 0.2 0.2 0.5. I just want them a little bit thicker. And when I deselect and tug off my guides, that's what my final calendar is going to look like. One final thing I want to do is place an off white rectangle at the bottom of the layer stack that matches the one that I use for the back cover. Again, my design needs to go to the edges of the canvas, and none of the information on here stretches to that point. So I'm going to select my rectangle tool. Now, since I had just created one for the back page, I can command or control click on my canvas, and it's going to give me the exact size I need. So I'll click Okay, and then I want to center this up on my Canvas, hit Apply, and I'll go up to the layer order here, and I'm just going to click to send this to the back. With the master pages complete, let's move to the next lesson where we'll look at the data merge tool and get the monthly calendar ready for the final merge. I'll see you there. 11. Data Merge Layout Tool: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the data merge layout, which we'll be adding on top of our monthly grid. This is going to help us automate the process of adding our sequential dates within a given month. As well as add new pages for each subsequent month until we have all 12 in place. Let's take a look. The data merge layout tool is standard in the default layout studio and can be added to any default or custom studio. This tool is a go to when creating what's called an end up print layout. For example, printing multiple business cards in a grid on a single page, mailing labels on a single sheet, or in our case, a grid of dates that we want placed across and down the page in sequential order. Using the tool is optional. You can use data merge directly on a page or a table without using repeat layout. But in the case of the calendars that we're creating, that would mean manually adding 12 pages for our months, then tying a data field to all 504 cells across 12 tables in order to ensure our data is added correctly and without manual intervention. Instead, we're going to add a data merge layout to a single monthly grid, and that layout is going to automatically populate our dates as well as add the necessary pages for the additional months. Going to select my monthly grid content page, so I'll double click. You always want to add your data merge layouts to the content page, not the master page. In this case, it's going to duplicate the page as many times as it needs to until the data is completed. In this case, 11 pages so that you end up with 12 months. You don't want to add 11 additional master pages, and in many cases, it wouldn't even work anyway. So just make sure that you select your content page. Tool works similarly to the table tool in that you start to drag out cells, but it's always going to start with four cells. So I'll go up to my tools here and select that and begin to drag out from here. So you can see I have four cells. I'm going to drag this out first and then add my additional cells. So I'll bring this down to the bottom. I want to set the cells in this to match my table. So I'll go up to the top. I don't want any sort of gap between my cells. And for the vertical, I want six rows. And for the horizontal, which would be the weeks or the days of the week, I'm going to add seven. You can see now it's matching my table. When you do that, you want to make sure that preserved cell size is toggled off and then change your numbers. If you leave that toggled on, it's going to add cells in whatever size you've dragged out first rather than maintaining what you had in place. Let's take a quick look at the contextual menu. I want to leave record offset set to zero because I want my data merge to start on the very first cell. Record advance is going to stay set at one because I don't want it to skip any cells. I'm going to temporarily toggle on Show record order, and you can see these arrows pop up. I'm going to use that to show you the record origin. So this is going to tell Affinity where you want to start. On the layout and where you want it to end. So right now I have it set to top left. So it's going to start in this first cell, work its way across, go down the table and keep working its way across until it gets to the bottom right corner. And that's exactly how I want it to work. If I were to change it and watch the arrows, if I set to the top right, it's going to go in the opposite direction. Bottom left, I'll start down here and work its way up to here. And then, of course, bottom right is opposite of that. So I'm going to set this back to here. For the layout order, I can either set it to do columns first, which is what it's going to do here or rows first. So you can see that it's going to start here, go down the row, go back up. That's not what I want. I actually want it to go columns first. If you're ever not sure if you have your setup correctly, just toggle on show record order so that you can see these directional arrows. So we've placed the layout itself, but we're not quite done. In order for this to work, we need some sort of data place holder inside. In this case, a text frame that's going to show the date. The benefit of using the layout tool is that I only have to place one data place holder in the first cell, and it's going to repeat it across all of them. Let me show you the filled shape. I'm going to select the data merge layout so that it automatically clips my shape inside. I'll select the rectangle tool, and I just have a fill selected there. When you drag out a square over this first cell here, remember, the layout tool is matching the table behind it. And you can see that when I do that because this rectangle is clipped inside of the layout tool, it's repeated across and then down the rows to the last cell. The calendars, we're going to add a text frame for our dates, and then the date emerge we'll add the actual date information. So I'll select my text frame tool. I have the layout selected. I find it's easier with a text frame to start outside and then move it into the actual square. So even though it's clipped inside, I'm going to start on the outside here. I'll hold Shift down to get a square and then just drag it into place in the top corner. If I click in here, you can see that because I had already used text frames here, it's already center and vertically align, but if yours isn't, make sure you're doing that here. And if I type a number in here, you can see that it's repeating across and down. Now I'd like to start by typing a number in just so that I can check if I want to move the alignment at all. So let me key in 31 because that's the largest number. If I like where this is placed, which in this case, I do, I leave it as is. If I want to, though, even though I have it center and vertically aligned, I can adjust the spacing a little bit using the text frame panel. So I'm going to click on this icon right here and you can see that you have insets. If I find this is set too far out, say, from the left side or the right, I can push some of these numbers up. Let me actually bring that back, deselect the aspect ratio. And then you can see I can push it to the right without impacting everything else. I can change the right side and maybe put 50 pixels in and it's going to push it. Actually like it centered up, so I'm going to leave it as it is, but just know that you have the option of making some minor adjustments here using the insets if you select the text frame and then open the text frame panel. Now that I know my numbers look fine, instead of having a date in there, I'm going to put left carat D right carat for date. Once I tie the fields to this, it's going to update that with the information and the data merge. Again, I'm going to add a textile once I have the template pulled in, but for now, I'm just going to keep this centered up vertically and horizontally with the default font and scale. Once I run the data merge, it's going to run through all 42 cells on this layout in the record order that we set up at the top. If a record on the spreadsheet is blank, it's going to leave that text frame blank. As it runs, if it gets to the last record on a page, but data remains, it's going to add another page with another layout and continue the process until it runs out of data. So in this case, it's going to run through 504 records with dates on it. In the end, we're going to have 12 pages for January through December that look just like this with dates added and applicable records. Now, I want to note, this is the only place that I'm going to add a data merge layout. Remember earlier I mentioned that you can add data merge fields directly to a page without using the tool. That's what's going to be the case for the text frame up at the top of the page. I don't need a data layout tool for that because the page is already being repeated by this one. Now that everything is in place on the Sunday Start and Master page, I'm going to duplicate it and rename it Monday Start. The only change that I need to make is to the days of the week. So let me select this one. I'm going to hit Duplicate. I could also right click and choose Duplicate. And I'll come back to the Monday start in a second. I want to rename this while I'm here. This is going to be Monday Monthly Grid Sunday Start. And then this one is going to be Monthly Grid Monday. And I need to click in here and change the days of the week. And the way that I'm going to do this is just delete Sunday. I'll select Monday and hold down Shift. And I can click in, and if I double click, it's going to select each day. And then I can Command or Control X to cut it, pop into this first one, Command or Control V to paste, and then all I need to do is type out Sunday. Next, I want to add a content page for that new Monday start page. So I'll select page three, and I'm going to hit Add Page. Under the Master page, I'm going to change this to Monday. It's going to add right after page three. I'll click Okay, and I'm all set. We'll talk more about these two content pages in a little bit when we begin tying our data merges to them. We have our data merge layout in place. Let's head into the next video and open up the data merge spreadsheet to take a look at the data that will be driving our final calendar. I'll see you in the next video. 12. A Look at the Data Merge Spreadsheet: Before we pull our spreadsheets into the data merge panel, let's take a closer look at the data provided and talk about how it's going to drive the final calendar. I'll also show you the one and only thing you'll need to update each year when making a new calendar. Let's get started. The spreadsheets that I provided has two tabs at the bottom. One includes the information for the Sunday starts, the other includes the information for the Monday start calendars. If you're opening this in Google Sheets, numbers, LibreOffice, or any other spreadsheet program other than Excel, you may find the formatting slightly off, but it's still going to work fine. You'll notice there are long dates and days of the week on there, and that's because I pull these from a much more detailed spreadsheet that I've created for an upcoming planner class. The long dates are going to drive the short dates, though. All dates are ultimately drawn by the year and see A two. I don't recommend moving or changing anything unless you're experienced with Excel formulas because any changes can result in broken formulas, which can result in incorrect date information on your calendars. Again, in a little bit, I'm going to show you the one thing that you'll change each year, but that's the only thing you should need to change. I provided date information through the year 2040. Two of the columns that we'll be using in this class, in addition to the year in cell A two, are the short dates with leading and trailing dates in column E. And the short dates without leading and trailing dates in Column L. It's up to you which type of calendar you want to create. If you want complete rows on all of your calendars, where the month either starts after Sunday or Monday or ends before Saturday or Sunday, then use the data in Column E. That's going to pull in leading dates from the prior month and add trailing dates for the upcoming month. If you only want the dates that are in a given month with no leading or trailing dates, then use the information in Column L. The only exception in this column is January and December. January is going to have leading dates if it doesn't start on a Sunday or Monday, and December will have trailing dates if it doesn't end on a Saturday or Sunday. You can manually remove them from the calendar itself once the date emerges run if you prefer not to have them in there. For my calendar, I'll be using column E because I do want to add leading and trailing dates on all of my months. Again, since these will be single month wall calendars, I like to provide leading and trailing dates because the prior and upcoming month can't be seen alongside of it. If this was a year at a glance calendar where all of the months are on a single page, I wouldn't include leading and trailing dates. The data merge is going to run through all 504 rows on this spreadsheet and bump it up against the 42 cells that are in the data merge layout that we added to our monthly grid. As I mentioned in the last lesson, it's going to add a new page for each month, each with that same 42 cell data merge layout, and keep doing that until it gets through all 504 rows. That's why the data merge layout is important. If it didn't exist, it would add way more pages than we would need to accommodate the 12 months. The other two columns that we're going to be using on this spreadsheet are in columns P and Q. So let me just move over here. And you can see that it lists a year and a month with a lot of space in between each one. The formula that's in both of these columns is counting out 42 rows for each month and adding the year and month on the next row after that. That's going to allow the data merge to place the data on the 12 pages that are being created by the day data in the other two columns without creating more pages than needed. If I have the year and month listed in every single row, rather than just adding it to the top of the 12 pages, it's automatically going to create 504 pages to accommodate that. Again, this is a lot of information all at once that's going to make a lot more sense once we begin to run the data merge, but I do want to show you how this is laid out. As I mentioned earlier, there's only one thing that you're going to need to change each year, and that's the year here in Cell A two. Cell A two is included on both the Sunday start and the Monday start. If you click on the dropdown, you can see that I've included dates through 2040. All of the data in the other columns are going to adjust automatically when you change the year. It's even going to take leap years into account. So I think 2028 is a leap year. If I scroll down, you can see that it's automatically included February 29. If you're creating both a Sunday and Monday start calendar, make sure that you change the year in both tabs. That way, when you pull it in, it's going to be correct in Affinity. Again, you can use any spreadsheet program to update this cell, make sure that the final export is an Excel format. If you're in Excel to update it, all you need to do is save the file. You can use the same spreadsheet for as many calendars as you'd like to make in a year. The only time you need to make this change is when you're creating one for a new year. Since this spreadsheet has already set up with 2026 for both the Sunday and Monday start, it's good to go. So I'm going to clue out of here and head back into Affinity so we can take a look at the data merge panel to finish setting up the data. I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. The Data Merge Panel: The key to automating this process as much as possible and making the calendar template reusable each year without a lot of manual intervention is the data merge. The data merge panel is in the layout studio by default and can be added to any other studio both default and custom. The panel is going to connect your data source, in this case, the spreadsheet, to the fields on your layout and combine them into a new document. So the data merge isn't going to happen on the original document. It's going to leave that untouched and generate a copy that merges the data with the layout. Everything that you create here in the original, including all master and content pages, layers, filters, et cetera, will carry over to that copy. This allows you an original version to go back to if the data merge doesn't run as planned. Let's start with a basic rundown of the options in the panel itself. When you first open it, it's going to give you the option to add a data file. So I'll click on that, and I'm going to bring in the spreadsheet that I provided with the downloads for class. Once your spreadsheets in place, you're going to see it up here at the top. The plus line next to it is going to allow you to add additional data sources, which we're going to be doing in this class to create our Sunday and Monday start in two separate merges within the same document. The trash can will show up next to each source so that you can delete them individually. Vial will take you to your files wherever it's saved. Replace is going to allow you to replace an individual spreadsheet or relink it if you've moved the file. If you make a change to the original spreadsheet and save it, Refresh is going to update your source here in Affinity with the latest changes. For your data merge, you have the option of using a text file like a CSV, a JSON file or a spreadsheet like the one I provided. If you're working with a spreadsheet and have individual sheets setup, you can select the individual sheet here. If you plan to use a spreadsheet, regardless of what program you created in, again, make sure that you export the file in Excel format because that's the one most compatible with Affinity. It's going to allow you to use the separate sheets within the same spreadsheet like we'll be doing in this class. Once your data is selected, you have the choice of using all records to run the data or limiting it to a range. For example, if I only wanted to run a monthly grid for January but not the other 11 months, I would click on Range and change this to 42. That's going to limit the data merge to the 42 rows at the top of the spreadsheet, and that's it. If I wanted to add February to the merge, I would then enter 84 and so on. When running our calendars here in this class, we're going to run all records so that it goes through all 504 rows and creates all 12 months. Not going to be using advanced data tools in this class, but this allows you to create filters, set up your merge to run in a particular sort order, and even add scripts to the merge. Under repeat here, you can tell Affinity what pages a particular merge applies to. I'm going to go into more detail on this in a little bit when we set the merge up because it's going to make a lot more sense that way. So let's skip to the next. Preview with record is going to show you a preview of the data once your ranges and fields are in place so that you can double check it before you generate the merge. Run the merge, we need to add fields to our placeholders, so here. And you can do that either by choosing Insert field or by opening the fields panel. You can do that by going up to Window, down to references and choosing fields. We pull this up here and expand it so you can see the difference. Difference between these two is that if you're adding a lot of fields at once, the panels a better option as Insert field because this closes each time you make a selection. This stays open until you decide to close it. And finally, once your data merge is in place and you're ready to run it, you can click on Generate. Again, it's going to create a copy of your document and merge your data with your layout while leaving the original here intact. Now that we have a better understanding of how the data merge panel is broken out, let's head into the next lesson where we'll tie the data from the spreadsheets to the content pages set out for them. I'll see you there. 14. Data Merge: Creating the 12 Calendar Pages: Our data merge layout is in place along with the placeholder for the dates, but one final step we need to take is to connect those to our spreadsheet. In this lesson, I'll show you how to connect your data to your monthly pages so that the merge automatically creates the additional pages for the months, as well as loading the data for the days, months and years. Let's get started. As a reminder, I have two master pages for my monthly grids, one for a Sunday start calendar and the other for a Monday start. Each has its own content page. I'm going to run two separate merges within the same document, one for each calendar version, and I'm going to set both merges up ahead of time. Affinity gives you the ability to toggle specific merges off so that they don't run with others that are set up. Each merge is going to be run on a copy of the original document and open as its own separate file. Now, one thing I want to note is there's no built in way to turn off a specific content page before running a data merge. For example, I can't turn off the content page for the Monday grid before I run the Sunday Start data merge, which means the Monday Grid content page is going to carry over into that Sunday merge. There won't be any actual information tied to it because that merge is turned off. The layout itself is going to show up in the copy generated by the merge. It can be done using a script, but that's for an entirely different class. The easiest way to deal with this is to simply delete the pages that I don't want once the merge is run. In this case, that would work well because I only have one page to delete. Now, if I were working in a much larger document, like a fully dated planner with hundreds or thousands of pages, where I would have lots of extra pages to delete, I would most likely create two individual documents, one for each version. There are other manual options like swapping out master pages, but they're all prone to manual mistakes, so I don't necessarily recommend them for larger documents. For this class, since I'm working in a less complex document, I'm going to stick with deleting the unwanted page once the data merge is run. Let's go ahead into the data merge panel and link up the spreadsheet. I'm in content page three, which is the monthly grid that's currently tied to the Sunday Start and Master page. I've already pulled my spreadsheet in. I'm going to go up to the top here and select monthly pages Sunday. I want to keep this set to all records because, again, I want it to run through all 504 rows of data to create and complete the grids for the 12 months. I want to make sure that this is tied to only page three, because that's the only page that I want duplicated until all 504 rows are run through. So under repeat, I'll click on page Range, and under From I'll keep three. And when I hit tab, it's going to change the other to three, as well. If I were to leave this set to all pages, it would duplicate every content page, which is why I need to lock it into page three. Now, right now, I don't have anything tied to the page itself, but I'm going to toggle on preview with record so that when I do, I can see that it's working. In order to see a preview of my data, I need to tie a field to the text frame that's sitting inside of my data merge layout. Remember, I only need to do that once because it's going to repeat it across and down all 42 cells automatically because of that data merge grid. I'm going to double click into this first text frame, and I want to select all of the text inside of it. Now, I could pull in my fields panel, but I'm only selecting one bit of data. So I'm just going to click on Insert Field. I'm going to choose short date LT because I do want leading and trailing dates. When I do that, it's going to have 28 show up in all of the boxes because January started on Thursday this year. So the calendar is going to have the leading dates of the 28th through 31 December once the merge is run. Now, right now, it's only showing number 28 because the merge hasn't been run. But I can go to the preview here and I can click through, and you can see that it's going to change the numbers as I go through. Once the data merge is run, the actual dates are going to show. Until then, it's going to use a single number as a placeholder. In addition to the days in the calendar, I want to tie the month and the year placeholders to the data merge, as well. Since the data for these is on the same sheet within the spreadsheet and on the same content page, I can do it using the same merge. Click into the text frame and select the word month along with its carrots and once again, go to Insert Field, and I want to choose month Monthly Grid. And you can see that's changing it to January because I have preview on. I'm going to do the same thing with here. I'll select the word and the carats, choose Insert Field, and then click on Monthly Grid, and it's going to change it to 2026 because that's what I have selected in the spreadsheet. I can generate this right now, and it's going to run the Sunday Start calendar as a separate document. Before I generate anything, though, I want to add the data merge for the Monday Start version as well. First thing I'm going to do is go to my pages, and I want to make sure that I'm on page four for the Monday start. I'll go back to the data merge panel. Now, because the data for the Monday start is on a separate sheet, as the Sunday start, I need to treat it as an entirely separate merge. So I'm going to go up to the top, click on plus, and I'm going to pull another copy of that spreadsheet in click Open. You can see it breaks it out here. So this top one is the Sunday. That's tied to page three. This is the one from Monday. I haven't tied anything yet, so it says whole document. Sheet, I'll choose monthly pages Monday. I'll keep this set to all records. And again, I need to lock this to page four, so I'll click on Page Range and change from to four. Going to toggle on preview with record, and just like with the Sunday Start, I need to tie my fields. I'll double click into this text frame and select all of the text. Under Insert Field, I'm going to choose short date leading and trailing, and you're going to see the number 29 showing up because for the Monday start calendar, the year started on the 29th if you're using leading dates. I'll select the month, and I'm going to click on Insert Field. Choose months. And then do the same thing for a year. Once my fields are in place, I'm going to save this document one final time before the merge. It's always a good idea whenever you're doing data merge to make sure you have a saved document somewhere just in case. You can always tell when you have updates that need to be saved because you see an asterisk next to the information up here at the top, as well as down at the bottom right. So I'm going to command or Control S to save. And once I do that, you can see that disappears. Before I run my merge, I want to go back into my data merge panel here and toggle off the Monday merge, because, again, I don't want that data merge to run at the same time as the Sunday merge. When I do that, you can see the fields are still there, but the preview is toggled off, which is exactly what I want. With the spreadsheets in place for the monthly grids, I'm ready to save this as a neutral Affinity template for future calendars. We'll look at templates and how they work in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 15. Saving a Neutral Calendar Template: With the image text, and data merge placeholders in our layout, it's time to save them as templates. Doing so is going to open a clean copy every time we want to create a new calendar, ensuring we don't have to do a lot of manual cleanup or correction from old data being in place. Let's take a look. Well, I have placeholders in my layout. I'm keeping this as neutral as possible by leaving some things out for now. Again, I have no text styles in place, so everything is set up with no style styles here in the textiles panel, and it's set to my Aerial 12 point default. I'm leaving the data merge for the image pages out of the templates, and I'm going to add them to the calendar specific data merge once I open a new template. I'm also leaving images out of the front and the back cover because I want them to be specific to the calendar that I create. Before I export this as a template, I'm going to do a final double check just to make sure that all of my layers are named and grouped where necessary. Before we save our templates, let's take a quick look at how they work. So templates are organized by folders and can be opened from the M templates section here on the home screen. Ultimately you drive how they're organized. You can set up a single folder for everything or create subfolders like I've done here. So I have an overall Affinity templates file that's an easily accessible Cloud file. There are no templates save directly inside of this file, but rather individual sub files that are broken out by type. Affinity establishes a target folder as a template file. In this case, that's my Affinity Templates folder. Anything inside of that folder is treated as a template. Now, that includes documents that have been saved with an AFI file extension. So you don't necessarily have to export it as a template. It's going to be treated as one regardless as long as it's housed in the target file. You aren't limited to one target folder, either. You can set up as many as you'd like, and each one can have its own subfolders. To create a target file, just click on the plus sign at the top left of the M template screen. This is going to open up your browser so that you can find and select the specific folder. Subfolders need to be created within your browser. So anything that you add to that target folder there in your browser is automatically going to sync with Affinity and show up here. So when I set up my target, this is the one that I set up when I clicked on the plus sign. All of these were set up within the finder on my Mac. Only target folders can be deleted through the Affinity app. You'll select the folder and choose the trash can. Subfolders need to be deleted through your browser. The easiest way to get to where they are is to right click on one of the templates inside of them and choosing Reveal in Finder. I'm back in the calendar template I set up, and I have two options to save this as a template. The first is to go up to the top to file down to export and choose as template. That's going to open up my finder where I can locate that Affinity Templates folder. I have a subfolder set up for calendars, so I'll double click into that, and I'm going to name this something like calendar neutral template. And I'll click Save. I go back to my template screen and click on the calendars, you can see that it's right there. The second option would be to take this calendar template AF file and move it into the subfolder under that Affinity templates file. Then it's going to be treated like any other template. Opening up a new template is as easy as double clicking on The thumbnail. You can right click on it and also choose Open as template. When you do that, you'll see that all of the original master pages, the layers, the content pages, and the picture frames are all there. You're also going to notice that it's untitled, and that's because this opens a fresh copy of that original one every time. So the very first thing I want to do is name and save this and then create my calendar. If you decide you want to make changes to an existing template, right click on the thumbnail and choose Edit. That's going to open up the template. You can make any of your changes. Choose File and savor, simply use the keyboard shortcut Command or Control S, and then next time you open the template, it's going to be updated with your save changes. Now that my layout is saved as a template and I've opened up a fresh copy, I'm ready to get the rest of the data merge set up. Coming up, we're going to set up the data merge needed for the image pages. I'll see you there. 16. Data Merge: Creating the Image Pages: In this lesson, we're going to add data to our merge to create the 12 image pages for our calendars. The final merge will generate at the same time as the monthly grids. There are a few differences when it comes to setting up the merge for images. Let's take a look. As a reminder, I had saved this part of the data merge for when I was in the calendar specific template. By adding these to a clean copy of the template, I don't have to swap or delete any images which can potentially cause errors. I've opened the template created in the last lesson and saved it as an AF file. So you can see up here at the top, I've named it the 2026 Paris Calendar Sunday, and I've named it pre data merge because this is the original copy. Remember, the data merge is going to be completed on a copy of this layout, but I want to make sure that I save this just in case I have a system issue or the merge doesn't run as expected. I also need to be able to come back to this to run the Monday version as well. Over the next few lessons, I'm going to update various aspects of this pre-merge file starting here with the image pages. The data that you provide with the merge will be links to the image files. So you'll need to make sure that the links are available when the merge is generated. You can either provide links to the files in your browser or URLs to images housed online. I have my images together in a file, and you can see that I've used alphanumeric labeling for them. For the data merge, the numbering isn't necessary because it's going to add the images in whatever order they're listed on the spreadsheet. However, in the next lesson, I'll be using these same files to fill in the picture frames on the back cover using autoflow, and this is going to help add them in order. I need to add these to a spreadsheet so that each image link is on its own row. You can add this to the spreadsheet that I provided under a new sheet or you can add it to an entirely new spreadsheet. Regardless of which you choose, the data merge for the image photos are going to be tied separately from the data merge for the monthly grids. I'm in my Excel spreadsheet and I've added a new sheet called Paris Images. If I keep my image data on separate sheets, anytime I create a calendar, I can add a new sheet, and that calendar's image data is always going to be available in case I decide to create a calendar in a different format or size or use them again in the future. At the top of my spreadsheet, I've created two headers, image number and image path. Really only the second one is necessary for the data merge itself, but I like to have the numbers there just to keep track of them as I'm adding them to the spreadsheet. There are a few ways that I can bring the info into my spreadsheet, but I'm going to show you the most straightforward way. Now, I'm on a Mac, but the process is similar on a PC, so you can still follow this. I'm going to right click on this first image, and when I hold down Alt on my keyboard, you can see that this changes to copy as path name. So I'll go ahead and click on that and go back to my Excel spreadsheet. Go to this first row and Commander Control V to paste it. I want to do that with all 12 images. Now, if you're on a PC, I believe the same process applies, but instead of holding um Alt, you hold down shift. So I have all of mine in place. One final step that I need to take is to remove the apostrophes from either side of the image name. If you don't remove those from around the image paths, Affinity won't be able to read the path when you bind it to the data merge. And I can do that as a simple find and replace, which should work similarly between all spreadsheet apps. Excel, I'm going to select all of my image rows there. And under Fine and select, I'm going to choose replace. I'll find the apostrophe and then replace it with nothing. So I'll go ahead and do a replace A, and it's made 24 replacements, so you can see that now all of the apostrophes are gone. Could also add additional information on here, like a column for the image name if I wanted to add that to my calendar, but I'm going to leave this as is and save it so that I can pull it into the data merge. I'm back in Affinity, and since the image info is on a different sheet and applies to a different page, I'm going to need to add another spreadsheet to the merge. I'm in the content page for my image page in this cage page two. And I don't want to tie this to the picture frame on the master page. It needs to be in the content page so that the data merge duplicates the pages to accommodate the 12 images. I'll click on the plus sign, and I'm going to select another copy of that same spreadsheet because remember, that's where I added my image paths too. You can see it's right there. So there's Sunday Start, there's Monday Start, and here's the one for the images. I want to select Paris images from the dropdown. I'm going to keep all records selected because I want it to use one through 12. I don't need to add anything to advanced data. Now, the page range should be two because I want this to attach to the picture frame on content page two, and it will add 11 additional pages until I have 12 images total. So I'll click on Page Range and from change to two. I'll preview with record. When I do that, you can see that nothing happens, and that's because under field, I need to select the picture frame on page two and then bind it. So I'm going to select the picture frame, and you can see that change from field to bind field. And I want to choose Image path. Remember, I only put image in there just so I had numbers to keep track. I want to choose Image path. And when I do that, it's going to place a preview of the very first one in the first row. That's all that I need to do with this. The data merge itself will generate the additional image pages for the rest of the month. Once that's run, if I want to move my picture frames around individually, I can do that, but I'm not going to do that here. With the merge for the image pages in place, I'm going to save my file and move on to the back page. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to take your image files and autopopulate an array of picture frames using autoflow. I'll see you there. 17. Autoflow Images in to a Photo Array: In a previous lesson, I showed you how to create an array of photo frames to create thumbnails for your calendar images. In this lesson, we're going to head back to that page, and I'll show you how you can quickly use the same list of images from the last lesson and automatically populate those frames using autoflow. Let's get started. Let's start by talking about what autoflow is. So autoflow is going to allow us to use the place tool or place function under file to quickly place multiple images in our frames in the order they're loaded into the place panel. This is where numbering the images comes into play. I have my files numbered based on the month that I want to use them in so that when I sort the files by name, they're automatically in sequential order, regardless of the actual name of the image. Affinity isn't reading the numbers, but the sort function does. In this case, we're adding all of our images to multiple frames on a single page. However, if we wanted to, we could have also used this process to create the image pages from the last lesson. Just like data merge, if I only had one picture frame in place, it would create as many pages as I need to complete the autoflow. It's important to note, though autoflow will only work on content pages. It will not work on master pages or documents within artboards. Once the images are in place, I can edit them individually if I don't quite like how they land in the frame using autoflow. When we were setting up these picture frames, I mentioned that I would talk a little bit more about layer order when we get to this point. So before we move any further, I do want to talk about that. Notice that I didn't reorder the frames so that the top was January and the bottom was December. I left it in bottom up order the way that I created it. And again, that's because I select all of my images and click on this first picture frame, which I intend to be January. And Affinity is going to read the layer stack from the bottom up. Any frames that are beneath January in the stack are going to be ignored. So if I had reordered these, so it was January down to December, Affinity would add more pages and add the rest to that page. This is a separate document that I set up to look just like the frame array and the other. The difference is that I reordered my layers so that January is at the top and December is at the bottom. Don't worry about recreating what I'm about to do. This is just to show you the issue with the layers. I'll go through this process much more slowly in the actual calendar. With nothing selected, I'm going to click on the Place Tool, and that's going to pull up my finder. I'm going to select these first 12 images and click Open, and that's going to open up the Place panel. Once that's open, I'm going to click into the first one and Command or Control A to select all of them. I could also click on the first and then Shift click on the last. I'll do the same thing. Watch what happens when I click into this first picture frame, which is supposed to be for January. So I'll click, and I'm going to go to my pages. If I scroll up, you can see that it filled in that first picture frame, but it left all of these empty and added pages for the rest. The reason for that is because it couldn't see the other picture frames because they were beneath January. The way that autoflow works is it reads bottom up. If my other layers had been above January, it would have put everything within the same array on the same page. So again, when you're creating your picture frames, make sure that you keep layer order in mind because the order there is going to determine how your autoflow adds your images. Let's jump back into the other calendar, and I'll show you the process again more slowly this time with the layer stack in the original order that I created them. I'm back here in the content page for my back page, remember, you need to make sure that you're on a content page and not a master page. I have nothing selected. You want to make sure that you've deselected everything. Autoflow can be initiated either by going to the Place tool, which is standard in layout studio or by going up to file and down to place. That's going to open up your finder. Now, this is out of sort order. I want it to be in the order that I want it to be placed. And in this case, I want to do it by the numbers that I have in the name. So I'll click on Name. I'll select one through 12 and click Open. Both options to place images are going to open up the place panel, and this is where you're going to run the autoflow from. I will note, though, that the place panel is only going to open when you use either the Place tool or function. It isn't a standard panel that you can leave sitting open in your studio, but it's going to automatically open when you use either of those tools. Once again, I'll click on the first image and Command or Control A to select all of them. I'm going to hover over the first image because I want January placed here and I'll click and it's automatically going to add all of my images to the 12 frames because, again, January was on the bottom, and then Affinity was able to read that there were 11 frame layers above that. If I go to my pages panel here, you can see that it didn't add any additional pages. Everything is on that single page. Once all of the images are in place, they can be edited individually. For example, this one is sitting a bit low, so I'm going to use the handle to drag them up. I can go through and do that with each one of them. If I need to swap an image out, I can use Replace Image up here at the top, or again, I can use the Place Image tool. In addition to autoflow, you can also use the Place Tool or Place function to add single images to a frame, and that's what I'm going to do for my cover image. I'll double click to select the content page for the cover. Using the Place Image tool, I'm going to locate that file and click on Open. Once it's pulled in, if I hover over the picture frame, you can see that I get that preview, and I can just click and it's going to place it. I might adjust this more after the merge. The one thing I do want to do here, though, is flip this. This image is going to look exactly like this on the inside of the calendar. But for the cover, because I have my text frames over here, I think that they'll read better on the blurred area here. So I'm going to go into my layers, select the image itself. I'll go up to the contextual menu to transform and flip horizontal. I'm also going to select the picture frame and click on it and just use the handle to move it up slightly. Again, I can make additional changes once I run the merge, but for now, I'm going to call this done. With all of the images in place, I want to update my pre-merge template with some textiles that I've saved. That's coming up in the next lesson, and I'll see you there. 18. Adding Text Styles to the Pre Merge Template: Remember those textiles that we set up and saved as assets in a previous lesson? In this one, we're going to pull them into our template and get all of our texts squared away for our data merge. Let's get started. By setting up all of your text prior to the data merge, you only have to update four or five content pages as opposed to a full calendar post merge. Plus, if you're creating variations like I am here with the Sunday and Monday starts, you only have to set them up once for all variations. So that doesn't lock anything in place, you'll still be able to edit them once the merge is run, but we're getting a good head start by setting them up now. Earlier in the class, I had set up a group of textiles and save them as assets. Now, as a reminder, my textiles panel currently shows the two no style styles because I saved my templates with the defaults. I'm going to pull that group of text frames in, and as soon as I do, you can see the textiles update. Now, I don't need to keep this group in here. That's just to add the textiles to the panel. I can safely delete that group, and as long as I don't choose delete unused styles before using them in my document, those are going to stay put. So I'm all set to start using these throughout my template. I'm going to start with the content page for the cover, so I've double clicked to make sure that it's active in my pasteboard here. I'm adding all of the textiles to the content pages, not the master pages. Head over to the layers here, and there's the Master page for the front cover. Now, master pages within a content page are locked, but there are some exceptions to that. If I open this up, you can see I have my two text frames here in a picture frame. Any placeholders like that can be updated even without detaching your Master page. I don't need to go up to the Master page and change them. I can change them right here. So I'm going to click to select that first one, and you can see I get those little Xs around it. And that's because I can't change the size of this text frame right now, but I can change the actual text and style. So I'm going to hit T on my keyboard, and that's going to put the cursor inside, and I'll change this to 2026 Paris Travel wall calendar. And then the subheader is going to be original photography by Tracey Capone. I like to add the text to my text frames before I change the text styles so I can better gauge what it looks like. I'm going to select the main header and choose large header, and you can see it automatically disappears. If I toggle off the eyeball, I think this might be just a touch too big. Even if I scale the text frame, I think it's a little overpowering. So I'm going to go up to the top here and just hit decrease font size to maybe right about there. And that's actually going to place it just fine, left to right. But you can see the eyeball is still there, and that's because the text frame is too short. I'm going to fix that in a second, but before I do that, I want to make a couple other changes. I think that the black is a little harsh for this, so I'm going to click on this charcoal gray and just lighten it up a touch. Now, those two changes, the scale and the color, have caused this little sink button to show up here at the top, as well as this plus. That means that an update has been made to the text style, and at this point, I have a choice of whether I want to sync it to save those updates or I want to move on. I think that 42 points is probably better for this header, and I like the charcoal and I want it to carry through to the rest. So I'm going to click that you can see those two disappear, and that means anywhere that I use this large header, it's going to apply the charcoal color, and it's going to set it to 42. So I'm going to go to the subheader. Let's click on medium header. The size is just fine, but the color is not. So I'm going to choose that charcoal again, and again, you can see that sink button shows up here at the top. Now, again, I do want this charcoal color to apply throughout the document, so I'll go ahead and sink that. So I just need to take care of the text frame size so that this doesn't overflow. Way to do this is to detach this page from the Master page. I don't have to go up to the Master page and change it. I want to detach this particular page from the front cover and do it that way. So I'm going to right click and choose Edit detach, and you can see I get this little teal bar up here at the top. And now those little Xs are gone, and that means that this is currently temporarily unlocked. So I can select the text frame, and I'm just going to make the height just a little bit bigger and the eyeball disappears, which means it's all set. So I'm going to click Finish. So again, just to recap, you can make updates to the placeholders where you change the text and the color and even the size. But when it comes to the text frame itself, if you don't go up to the Master page, you need to unlock or detach the page from the master page and change it here. I might make more changes to this before I do the data merge. I always do a final check, but for right now, I'm going to call that done and move to the back page. I'm here in the back page, and I want to change the text again. So it's 2026, Paris Travel wall calendar, and this one is going to be original photography by Tracey Capone. This time, instead of using the large header, I think that I'm going to use the medium header for both of these. But what I want to do is make the second one slightly smaller. So I'm going to select the top one and click to add the medium header textile, and you can see that color, the charcoal color is applied to it. And then I'm going to do the same thing here, but I want to make it slightly smaller. So again, I'm going to go up to the top, and I think I'll move that down to 24 points. Now, I don't want to update this header to 24 points because 30 works just fine normally. I only want to have that here. Even though this sink has shown up, I'm not going to sink and I'm going to leave it alone. Alright, next, I'm going to pop down to the bottom here, and I'm going to update the copyright information with the textile for the basic text. And I think I'll make that slightly smaller, maybe 12 points. And then I want to change the alignment to left align. Now, I don't want to change the textile, so once again, I'm not going to sync this. I'm only doing it for that. One final thing I do want to do though is change that to the charcoal gray. Then finally, I want to change the labels for the thumbnails. I'm going to go to the layers. It's going to be a little bit easier to do them all at once. I'll select all of the text frames for the labels here and I'm going to choose, let's see the days of the week one and how that looks. I think that looks good. The scale is good. I'm just going to click on the charcoal and let me toggle off. The guides here and just take a look and see if there's anything else I want to change. I feel like maybe this top one could be a little bit bigger, and I think I could move this one up. So once again, I need to detach the text frame. I'm sorry, detach the page from the master page. And then I'm just going to move this up slightly and make this one slightly bigger. I can close this. I don't actually need that open to do that. Just going to click on Plus, and I think 34 is good. Let me just turn off the preview again. Like how that's looking. I'm going to move into the grids for the calendars next. I'm in the Sunday Start calendar, and the great thing about both calendars having the same textiles is if I do adjust any of the textiles here, it's going to be a lot easier to apply them to Monday. So I'm going to start with the month and the year, and I'll click on the large header for that. I think that looks good. I think 42 works fine for that. It's not overpowering. I'll go ahead and select the text frame for the days of the week and click the charcoal is there. I think I might make this 24, though, and just make it a little bit bigger. In this case, I do want to sync this because I want to be able to apply it to the Monday grid, as well. So I'll click sync, and that's going to update it. And then finally, I need to update the actual days, but I only do that in the first text frame. So I'm going to click into that, select the text frame, and I'm going to choose basic text monthly grid. Now, it's changed the font, but I think I want to make it bigger. So I'm going to bring that up to probably 18 and I want to make sure that it's charcoal. So I'll click on that and then of course, update the text styles so I can easily apply it to Monday. So that's all I need to do for Sunday. I'm going to move over to the Monday calendar. Now, the Monday calendar, the preview is currently off. I find it a lot easier to temporarily turn this on. I just need to make sure that I remember to turn it off again before I run the data merge. So I'm just going to double click into here. And with the preview on, it's a little bit easier to see everything. So I'm going to go up to the top here and choose Large header. I'll go into the days of the week, and that scaling that I did on Sunday is already applied. And then finally, I want to click into here and choose basic text, and you can see the size is perfect and it's charcoal gray, as well. And I'm just going to run through and make sure there's nothing else I need to change. So I don't need to add anything to my photo page, so I'm all set. With the textiles in place and the data linked up, I'm all set to generate my data emerges, which I'm going to do in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 19. Generating the Data Merge: It's the moment of truth. It's time to take the layout and the data and put it all together by generating the merge. In this lesson, I'm going to show you the steps you need to take to run separate merges from the same document so you can easily create variations. Let's get started. Before I run the merge, I'm going to take a last look at my content pages just to make sure that there's no further adjustments that I want to make. I can always adjust the merged copy, but again, it's a lot easier to adjust four or five pages here rather than the full calendar. This is also going to make the adjustments for the Monday Start calendar, as well. Starting with the front cover, the image is fine. I like the placement of this. The only thing I want to do here is go to the master page for it and remove that ellipse. The guides and the margins won't print, but that was a shape that I added. So I want to make sure that I remove it. I'm going to do the same thing for the image page, and I'll double click back into the content pages. So this looks good. I think this is fine. I'm probably going to adjust the placement of the images once everything is run. But for now, that looks good. And then for the grids, I'm going to skip these two for a second because there's actually a few changes that I want to make. Let me go to the back page. I think everything there is good. I just want to go into the master page and remove that ellipse, and now I'll head back to the Sunday Start Grid. So the first thing that I'm noticing is that the days of the week for some reason, were not updated to the charcoal gray. You can see it's showing black, and it looks like the entire paragraph style is set as black, which means the Monday start grid is the same way. So I'm just going to click on the charcoal gray, and if I click on the update paragraph style, it's going to update it for Monday as well. I'm not going to change anything else with the table. What I do want to do is I did decide that I'm going to move the bottom of the table up above the ellipse here. So before I remove that, I'm going to go to the two grids, and I'll just zoom in here. And the first thing I want to do is take that margin and I'm going to pop it just to the top of the ellipse just as a start. And having snapping on helped make that easier. I want to move this ten pixels above it. So I'm going to hover over it with my move tool and you can see I get that double arrow. So I'll double click. And I want to change this to minus ten, and that's going to move it just slightly above. And then I'll take the bottom of the table and just drag it up until it pops to there. So there's the Sunday start. Now, I'm also going to have to go into the content page and adjust the layout. So let me grab this, drag it out, and now everything is aligned again. So it is possible to make changes. After you put things in place. You just need to understand what you have in place on the master page versus the content page and adjust accordingly. Next, I want to adjust the Monday start, so I'll double click into the master page and adjust the guide first. So again, I'm just going to drag this and snap it to the top of the ellipse. I'll double click on it, and this is going to be minus ten pixels, and then I'll take the table and move that up. And then finally, I just need to go into the actual grid and just adjust that data merge layout. So I'm just going to push that up. Going to remove the ellipses now that I've done that. I want to save this one final time now that I've made those changes, so I'll command or control S, and you can see that Asterisk disappears up there. Now, I'm ready to run the merge, but before I do that, I want to direct your attention down here to the bottom where this little red X is. This is live preflight, and if I click on it, it's going to open up the preflight panel. Pre flight is doing live checks in the background as I create my layout, and it's going to tell me if there are any issues that might cause a problem either with my export or emerge. So I have that red X, and if I open up the panel, I have four errors and one warning. Now, the four errors all have to do with the Monday merge, and that's because right now I have that toggled off because remember, I don't want that to run with this one. So if I go back to these errors, you can see that what it's saying is there's no data source that covers that monthly grid. There are overflowing text frames, and that's because with that data merge off, there are actually overflowing text frames because the preview can't work. So if I go back to this pre flight live check, these are all correct errors, but they're not errors that I need to correct before I run this data merge. Because if I were to toggle this on, you can see those they're going to disappear, but I don't actually want them to. I want them in place because I don't want my Monday merge to run. So I'm going to go ahead and turn that back off. This last one is not necessarily an issue. I find this pops up a lot, and I'm not entirely certain why. Sometimes it'll disappear if you click FIX. Sometimes it just stays, but it doesn't actually prevent you from running it, so I'm actually going to ignore it because I know my data merge is fine. It's always a good idea to at least look at pre flight, just to see if there are any errors that you need to correct, especially if they're going to prevent the merge from running properly. If you don't see anything down here, then just click to open the panel, and you can see there's an option of never export and Live. If you want it to run in the background the whole time you're creating your layout, just turn on live. If you turn it off, you're not necessarily going to see anything down there until you do toggle it on and choose check now. Alright? With all of the double checks done and looking at my pre flight and giving it all clear on the errors, I'm ready to generate my data merge. So I'm going to go to the bottom here and I'll click on Generate. Now, sometimes you're going to get a message that says that the data merge is outdated. You can just click, and it's going to run through. Now, depending on your system and how much you're running, it might take a minute or two. It's also potentially going to ask you if you want to link images. Rather than embed them, my document is set up with embedded images, and I'm fine with that. So I'm going to click No and let it run, and it's going to pop open the copy with the data merge complete. So my Sunday start is run and ready to finalize for Export, which we're going to do in the next video. But the first thing I want to do is go into my pages panel, and I want to remove that extraneous Monday page. So I'm going to click on it and click on Delete. Once that's done, I'm going to save this right? I'm back here in the original document. I'm going to go back to the data merge. I want to toggle off Sunday and toggle on Monday. I'll just look at my pages just to make sure there are no issues. So you can see that the Sunday start calendar is now toggled off, which means that these are overflowing, so I'm going to get errors. There is the Monday Start calendar. Everything looks good with that. So I'm going to go back to the data merge, and I'll click on Generate. The same things are potentially going to pop up, so I'll click yes. If it asks me if I want to link, I can say no or yes, depending on what I want to do. Okay, I'm in my Monday start that is run. I'm going to go up here. And get rid of the Sunday start calendar on this one, and then I'll go ahead and save it. While I'm going to be making some changes to these two calendars before I export them, I want to make sure that I save both of them so that I have a starting point to go back to. I've also gone ahead and saved the original document and closed that out. At this point, I don't need it, so I might as well save it and get it out of the way. Now, before we wrap this lesson up, I want to take a look at the Layers panel, post merge so that I can show you how everything shook out. This is important to know if you want to make post merge adjustments, which we're going to be doing in the next lesson. Everything for the master page for the monthly grid, including the text frames for the month in the year, are still inside of that master page. Again, in order to make any changes in here, you either need to change the master page, which is going to change the content for every page attached to it, or you need to detach the individual page to make changes to that specific page. Again, we're going to be doing some of that in the next lesson. So for now, let's just set this aside. Data merge layout that was put into place to add the dates to the table is sitting above that, and it's now a group of text frames with masks attached. So each individual date is here in its own group layer, and it can be edited or deleted, again, something we're going to be doing in the next lesson. Let's tad into the next lesson where we'll go through our content pages and make adjustments before we export. I'll see you there. 20. Making Adjustments Post Data Merge: While a number of edits were made to the template prior to the data merge being run, there are some changes that need to be made post merge once the additional pages are in place. I'm going to start with the monthly grids. There are a few things that I want to do to these now that the data merge is complete and all of the pages are in place. The first is that I want to go through each month and clean up the tables to remove any unnecessary rows and Bank data merge information. Remember, in order to get these calendars to run each year without manual intervention, we added tables with 42 cells for each month. Now that the merge has been generated, you can see that there are several months that don't need the full table, and those rows can be removed. Now, if you prefer not to remove them, you can also merge those cells together and create a notes section. I don't tend to do that because it's not going to be uniform throughout the calendar because a few of the months are going to use all six rows, and in some cases, February doesn't need more than four. Instead, I'm going to run through all of the grids and delete the rows that I don't need, then resize the table so that the remaining rows take up that space. I also want to change the opacity of leading and trailing dates, so they're set apart from the regular dates for that month. In the interest of time, I'm going to make my changes to the Sunday start calendar on camera and make all of the same changes to the Monday start off camera. When it comes to adjusting the tables, I need to change each individual calendar page because changing the master page that they're tied to is going to affect every page the same. Remember, some months use the exact same amount of rows, but there are others like February that only used four. In the case of 2026, May uses all six. Now, technically, I could create two additional master pages, one with four rows and one with only five, and then tie them accordingly. But I'd still have to adjust the data in the data merge layout, and it's easier to do it with the table. For the sake of these, I'm just going to update each page individually. Make my updates in specific order so that I don't miss any changes as I go through the 12 months. The first thing I'm going to do is make sure that I'm in the content page for January. I'll go to the layer stack, and I'm going to start with the data merge layout. Remember, once the merge is run, that data becomes a collection of individual groups that sit outside of the master page, which means that I can easily make adjustments to it without having to detach it from the master. Going to start by removing any data groups that have no information in them. In this case, the groups that sit at the end of the calendar in the row that I'm going to remove. When the data merge runs, it adds everything in bottom up order. So the beginning of the month is at the bottom of the layer stock, and the end of the month is at the top. You can see the first few groups here have no information in them. They have a blank thumbnail. So I'm going to select the first one, shift click the second one, and delete them. Next, I want to adjust the opacity of the leading dates on this page. There are no trailing dates, only leading. Again, the beginning of the month is at the bottom of the layer stack, so I'm going to head down there, and you can see 28, 29, 30 and 31. I'm going to select the first one. Shift click to select the last, and I'm going to hit four on my keyboard. That's going to change the opacity of all four of those to 40%. With the data merge curves taken care of, I'm going to move on to the table itself. Since I'm not adjusting the master page, but rather the individual pages, in order to adjust the table, I'm going to detach each page from the master page, make the changes, and then attach it again. To do that, in my layers, I'm going to select the Master page, and I can either right click and choose Edit detached or as long as I have my move tool selected, I can click on Detached up here at the top, and you can see it at the teal bar that says the page is now detached. The first thing that I want to do is remove row six. So I'm going to select my tabletol and select the table itself, and I'll just drag up to remove that row. I want to move this down to this line, but you can see if I do that by itself, the data stays where it is. So instead, I'm going to keep that selected. I'll command or control click to select the data merge group. I'll hover over that control point t, up and down arrow and then just drag both down until they snap to that safe zone line at the bottom. Once that's done, I'm going to click Finish to reattach the page. And let me turn the preview off here and you can see that's how the final page looks. I'm going to double click so that I'm in the content page for February, and you can see that it's only taking up four rows on this Sunday start calendar. Now, that's not always the case. If I hop over to the Monday start calendar, you can see that because Sunday is now at the end of the week, and there's the first, because this is later in the week, it's pushed all other dates down, and it's taking up the fifth row. Moving back to the Sunday start calendar, removing two entire rows presents a bit of an aesthetic challenge in that the boxes for this particular page is going to be taller than the others once I move everything down to that safe zone. Now, since it's on its own page and there's nothing next to it to compare to, I'm not going to worry about that. It's easier to have boxes be slightly different than the others than adjust the entire table as well as the data just for this one page. I head over to the layers. Now, there are no leading and trailing dates for this one, so all I need to do is adjust the table itself, but I do need to remove those empty rows. So I'm going to open up the data merge group and select all of these blank ones. Well, click and then Shift click to select the other and delete. Then I want to go right into the table and adjust the table itself. So I'll select the table and right click, choose Edit detached and click on the table. I can drag both of these up so that I only have four. And then I want to command or Control click to select the data merge group also and drag these down. I'm going to drag them down until I pop to that safe zone and click Finish. Let me turn the preview off. So you can see that the boxes are a lot taller. But it's not significant enough to make it worth the effort to actually create a master page just for February and adjust the scale of all of the boxes. I'm going to leave this as is. I'm going to speed up and create the rest of the month so you don't have to watch me go through each individual one, but before I do that, I want to show you May. This is one of the months that used all six rows in 2026. In this case, I have no empty boxes to remove, so I don't need to adjust the table. The only thing that I need to do is adjust the opacity of the leading and trailing dates. I have no blank spaces that I have to remove either. August is actually going to be the same way. So I'm going to go back to March here and I'm going to go through the rest of the month as a time lapse, and I'll see you on the other side. Alright, all 12 months are done, and you may have noticed about halfway through that I wasn't physically going up to the top here and clicking on Finish to close the master page. You don't actually have to do that if you're about to go to another page. So all I really needed to do is go to my pages and double click into the next one, and that automatically reattaches the page to its master. So with my month grids all set, I'm going to go ahead to the pages panel and expand it so that we can take a look at the sort order of the calendar. I've gone ahead and changed my thumbnails and my pages panel to large, and I've dragged this out so that you can see the entire calendar at one time. This is where that comes in handy. So the first thing you're going to notice about the calendar is that the pages are out of order because the data merge created it in the order that I created the template. Now, in my case, my print on demand company has me load one page at a time. So technically, I can leave this as is. However, if I sort it now, even as individual files, it's going to export in whatever order I place them here. And that's going to make it a lot more efficient to upload my files on my print on demand site. If you're working with a print on demand company that allows you to upload a complete file with all of your content pages as a PDF, sorting your files prior to export is important. And again, this is where the size of the thumbnails matters. So I have this set too large so that I can drag them out and they stack on top of one another, because remember, if you keep them as extra large thumbnails, it's only going to increase the size as I drag out. To reorder the pages, I'm just going to click and drag on a page to move it. I'm going to move away from the table tool and scrap my move tool. You just have to determine which is easiest. There's the cover page, that's January. So I'm just going to take my January month grid and move it next to it. And I'll just keep doing that with each month until I've moved everything up to December. Okay, my sort order is in place. And the next thing I want to do is make sure that all of my picture frames, the image inside of it is placed where I want it. I've gone ahead back to my pasteboard here rather than using these. Now, the cover sheet the cover image rather, I had already placed. So this one is actually fine. I'm going to double click into the individual image pages and just see if anything needs to be moved around. Know this image needs to be moved up, so I'm just going to drag that up, but I don't want to drag it to the left. I want to keep it straight. If you hold Shift down while you drag up, it's going to keep it in line. I'll double into this next one, and I think this one's actually fine right where it's at. I just like to run through each one and make sure that nothing's getting cut off. If I need to, I can scale this up. So I don't want any part of this sign getting cut off. You can see that it's not in the safe zone. So I'm just going to drag this over to the left. I'm not so much worried about the edge of this getting cut off, but I don't want any of the letters being cut off. All right, so that's good there. This one, I think is fine. I'm just going to run through all of the image pages and then head to the back page to do the same thing. Okay, I'm here on the back page, and basically, I'm going to do the same thing with each individual picture frame that I just did with the image pages themselves. Those are all set. I didn't have to be as careful with where I was cutting things off with this one because these aren't going to the edge of the page, but I still want to make sure that they look as close as possible to the images inside since they're intended as thumbnails. Again, I'm going to make all of the same changes to the Monday start calendar that I did here in the Sunday start calendar, but I'll do that off camera. Now that we've gone through our calendars to make sure everything looks exactly as we want it to, and in next lesson, we're going to export our files to load onto our print on demand sites. I'll see you there. And 21. Exporting the Final Calendar: With our calendars run and all adjustments made, we're ready for export. As I mentioned in the last lesson, the import for Printify is page by page. So I'm going to need to export single pages rather than a full document. I plan to export my calendars as high resolution JPEGs, and I can do that all at once. And Affinity is going to save them as individual pages. Now, if you're using a print on demand company that allows you to upload a PDF, in other words, the full calendar combined, make sure that your pages are in order, and then you'll follow the same process I do using PDF as your export format. There are two ways to export your document, either by using the Quick Export button in the top right of the toolbar or going up to the top, choosing file, going down to export, and then choosing Export. That's going to bring up the main dialog box. Now remember, I said I'm going to export mine as high quality JPEGs, so I'm choosing best quality. That's going to pull up a set of presets on the right here that I'm going to run through and make sure they're correct. So the width and the height are fine. This was based on the template. I want to make sure that the aspect ratio is locked. I want to make sure that the area is all pages, not just the current page. Quality should be 100%. For the color format, I want it to use the document preset because remember, I used the template, and that was already set to RGB. In this drop down, I can save it alongside the original document, but I actually want to place it in a different folder. So I'm going to make sure that ask for location is on. And I'm going to leave Show and Finder toggled on, because as soon as the exports complete, the finders going to open it up and I can check and make sure everything looks okay. If you're on a Windows PC, it's going to open up your explorer. Before I hit Export, I want to go over to the PDF options. If you do need to run a full PDF because you're able to upload a combined document, again, make sure everything is in the right sort order, and then you're going to use PDF for print if you're using a company that has RGB. If you're working with a company like Gelato that uses CMYK, you want to set this to PDF press ready. Run through all of the options here and again, make sure that it's showing all pages, and then you're going to follow the same steps at the bottom. If you want it to save alongside the original document, you can do that, or have it ask you for a location. I've gone ahead and hit Export. I have a folder setup in my calendar folder for final calendar. I'll go ahead and hit Save. And as soon as it exports, it's going to open up my finder to that exact folder. My Sunday star calendar has successfully been exported, and it's here in my finder. You can see that it added it to the final calendar folder that I created. It's named it. However, I name the overall calendar and then added a number at the end. I could rename this if I wanted to, but I'm going to leave that as is. What I do want to do, though, is create a separate folder for these. So I'm going to select all of them. And I'm going to say Sunday, start Paris calendar. And then while I'm here, I'll create a new folder for Monday start Paris calendar, and I can select this when I go back to export the Monday start. With my calendars exported, I'm all set to import them into my print on demand company. Now, each company has its own method of import and uploading, so make sure that you check the guides for the company that you've selected to determine best practices. If you plan to sell your calendars like I do, check out the help guides for information on how to sync your calendars up with your platform or platforms. Again, each one is different, so it's important to check the specific instructions for the company that you've selected. With our calendars complete, it's time to wrap up class with some final thoughts. I'll see you there. 22. Final Thoughts: We're at the end of class, and as always, I thank you for trusting me with your time and creativity. I hope you've enjoyed learning how you can efficiently create calendars year after year by creating templates using Affinity. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the class. So please consider leading review as it lets me know what I'm doing well and where I might need to improve. Plus, leaning a review and sharing a project not only help future students see what to learn when they take the class, it helps more students find the class. In addition to my Skillshare channel, I also have a YouTube channel where I share short form tutorials that complement my suite of classes here. You'll find the link to it in my profile, as well as the PDF provided with class. And finally, I welcome you to join my free community for digital creators, the Creator Collage. We're a group of creatives of all skill levels with experience in a wide range of digital applications. You can ask questions, share your work, learn new tips, or share your own all in a friendly, non judgmental environment. You can find out more at the Link in my profile or again in the class guide. If you have any questions about what you learned in class, please don't hesitate to reach out to me either in the discussion below or at the email provided. Again, thank you so much for joining me here in class and happy creating.