R C-R

Not sure what you mean by "global setting" but from the help topic: Are you reading any of these help topics or just experimenting & hoping to figure out how everything works from doing that? If the latter, you could probably save yourself a lot of time & frustration if you spent some time exploring the help system & at least a few of the tutorials.

If you are talking about the Object Defaults, please start a new topic about whatever puzzles you about that, or (better yet) search the forums for topics about that.

For this particular one, I hope you can now see the logic of having two different pickers, each with different capabilities. Once you get used to it, you may find it quite handy to keep a picked color in the small color well plus the two you can set in the large wells.

That is why I suggested reading the relevant help topics. It only takes a few minutes & should help you understand how to best use each picker.

That is how the Color Picker Tool works with the "Apply to Selection" option enabled. The color picker in the Color & Swatches panels (& in the Color Chooser window among other places) as I said lets you set a third color to use when setting stroke or fill colors, so if you want to do that, use the tool & option designed to do that. Also, maybe read through the https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/pages/Clr/samplingClr.html topic for more about the differences between the two pickers.

The up to 3 that can appear in the circular color selector 'wells' in the Colors panel. This way you could have for example a red & a blue in the 2 large wells plus a picked yellow in the small one. Then, with an object selected clicking on any of the 3 will set the stroke or fill color of vector objects, depending on which of the large wells is selected (frontmost). If you want a 'one click' tool, I suggest you give the Color Picker Tool a try.

Because that gives users up to 3 choices of what color to pick to apply to selected object(s) & because otherwise how would the app know if you wanted to apply the color to a stroke or fill.

Are you saying that you do not convert artboards to pages when adding them to your APub document? Also, what exactly do you mean by integrating them into Publisher? How specifically are you doing that?

In Preferences (or Settings) User Interface there is an option to use Color or Mono icon style. Ha! Walt beat me to it by a few seconds.

Just curious but is your sig up to date & you are still running OSX El Capitan?

@wsaldhaus1, you didn't mention if you were a Mac or Windows user but if you are a Mac user & bought directly from Affinity you should find "Check for Updates" on the app menu & a setting in Preferences > Software Updates to automatically check for updates daily, weekly, monthly, or never.

You probably already know this but from what I can tell Canon does not offer driver support for the MX870 for any macOS version newer than OSX 10.11 El Capitan. So if you upgraded the OS or bought a new Mac you would either have to buy Vuescan or a new scanner.

That applies to the Toolbar but I think the OP is asking about grouping tools on the Tools panel. For that panel, other than the ones Affinity already groups together on the same icon (like for quick shapes) we can't make our own custom groups but we can add dividers & also use multiple columns to group tools in various ways. For example, this is how I have set up the Tools panel for the Designer persona in AD V2 on my Mac:

Of course, it is up to Apple to decide what it should say, but I agree that as it is it can be confusing.

As I (probably imperfectly) understand it, it isn't so much about what AP supports as what the software drivers provided by the makers of the scanners support, since they have a habit of not updating that for newer macOS versions to support old (& sometimes not so old) scanner models. That's why Vuescan is still popular after all these years. For instance, the only scanner I have is the one built into my ancient "all in one" Canon MP620 printer, first released in 2008. Canon only offers drivers for it for OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) or earlier so apps like AP or Apple's Image Capture can't use it on any newer macOS version without 3rd party help like with Vuescan. Vuescan supports this model but since I rarely do any scanning & on the rare instances I do I can use 'sneaker-net' to scan to a USB stick (or one of the ancient memory cards I have left over from an old camera), I do that to avoid having to buy Vuescan. If I did more scanning I might buy it but I would be more likely to buy a scanner with better macOS support.