Cailean

From my initial question asking for the location of the drop shadow effect in Publisher, this has turned into a very interesting discussion with lots of different views. 
Debate is healthy and informative and the reason why many forums exist. 
Also if we have concerns over a product, whether good or bad, the developers will be able to take these on board for future uodates, which again is a good reason for debate. 
Thank you everyone for your input. I've picked up a few useful tips. 

It would help if Serif just restored the Drop Shadow effect to its original, instead of all the fluffing around we now have to achieve it. 
Pageplus effects were much better and much faster. 

Don't say that to Thor @Cailean 

I'd say they were perspective shadows.
 

I also believe that drop shadow is different from an outer shadow and comes in many variations. To recreate some things in Affinity I think about how they were created in DP, what we had there was a nicely packaged, user-friendly version of drop shadow creation. Here is my view on how to replicate it in Affinity - using copy, colour, shear and a little gaussian blur if appropriate.  

How so? Can you provide an example pair of screenshots that show this?
Select all of the field's text. Enter a new value with the "mm" suffix. It will be converted to the equivalent pixel (px) value when you leave that field.

You can type any measurement unit in most/all value inputs. e.g., if I wanted a 5mm offset, I would type 5mm.

Would it help if, while dragging with the Offset Tool (maybe with a modifier key) the Radius automatically increased along with an increasing Offset distance?
That might make it easier to create a ‘lifelike’ drop shadow without having to modify any settings manually.
Just a thought.

I understand and share what you say about "Drop Shadow", but I can offer you a solution on the design notes. There is a very simple and powerful solution for what you need. Look at the video.
That is a great advantage, because you can save the file with the notes and export it without them.

In my experience the standard shadow effect settings in all software generally also needs additional manipulation to look good, depending on the job. I almost never am satisfied with the default settings.
The settings of Outer Shadow in Affinity and Drop Shadow in other design software are as good as identical, excepting the default settings.
But I do agree that it is rather odd that the Affinity devs decided to label it Outer Shadow and zero out the default settings, because:
most users would expect a standard Drop Shadow effect to be present in design software and one with acceptable default settings; Drop Shadow is an effect extensively used (Outer Shadow, however, much less so in my experience); a typical user would look for the same effect name, which is standard in all other design software (Outer Shadow is unique, as far as I am aware). And even the default settings don't "do" anything in this case, which can be confusing to novice users. Same with other effects. In my experience users tend to expect an immediate visual response from the design software, and that is exactly how it is generally done in most other design software. Apply an effect, see the effect applied, change the settings. In Affinity it works like: Activate the effect, nothing happens. Change the settings one by one to conjure up the intended effect.
The Affinity user experience does seem to go against the commonly accepted and expected one. Whether this is good UX or a less well thought design choice I will leave up to you.
Funnily enough I never noticed the change in effect name in Affinity before this discussion: my mind automatically 'translated' Outer Shadow to Drop Shadow. Never noticed the difference before :-)

I am aware of that, but I was giving my reply to the answers given here to my initial query.

Thanks Dan. 
It's unbelievable that such a fantastic piece of graphics kit doesn't have a drop shadow effect! 
Ok, I know that I can use the outer shadow effect and mess around with the settings, but messing around with the settings to achieve a basic effect like a drop shadow is inefficient in otherwise fast software. 
I'm sure I'm not alone in looking for a basic effect like drop shadow in Publisher and it must be included in a future update. 
I also think the other effects worked better in Page Plus than in Publisher. 

I'm an Indesign convert to Affinity Publisher and I'm still finding my way around. I've also been a user of Pageplus from the first "Tiger logo" version and up to version X9. I really like the new affinity suite and it's much more professional in every way.
However, I can't find that old bastion of graphics software, the drop Shadow either as an effect or as a tool in Publisher. I'm probably staring at it, but I can't see it, please help.
Also is there some way to add a small non printing notepad page on the canvas outside my design, so that I can type notes about the effects, fonts and info that I've used for future reference?

Hi, thanks for your help, the pasteboard is a great idea. However I still can't find a drop shadow effect. It was listed in Pageplus X9 in the FX panel, but it's not listed in Affinity Publisher. Outer shadow is not the effect that I'm looking for. Please see the screenshot from X9. Drop shadow is highlighted in blue in the X9 screenshot.