woodworker will

Thanks Mike, That's what I'm thinking. The closest I can get to book assembling is with a word processor. But I'll tell you what, when I'm approaching 100 pages or more, the format starts shifting and becoming unreliable. If BookPlus works for me, and I should know by mid May, I'll write about it here. The older I get (I'm 70 now) the less I need mail merge, but I'm writing more for the classes I teach.

There are two areas where changes to Affinity Publisher would serve me well. I've always used PagePlus to design advertisements and mail merge them to get them to my customers. The last really useful version for mail merge was PagePlus 6. it had great database integration with many import formats. From PagePlus 7 on, most of the file formats had disappeared. I keep PagePlus 6 installed for my advertising. Truth be told it is still a very good product and functions just fine on Windows 10 Professional... Affinity Publisher has no mail merge that I can see. The way Affinity Publisher handles books is to allow me to "section" portions and allow a differing numbering format for each section. PagePlus 9, and previous versions, also had this feature although it is hidden in the menu system. This "section" feature has limited usefulness in publishing a book, especially a long one. Pageplus 9, and previous versions, has a feature called BookPlus, in the File menu under "new". This allows me to assemble a group of chapters, control the page numbering, add a table of contents, an index, and change the order of the chapters at will. I cannot speak as to how effective it is but I am building a current manual with 12 illustrated chapters and will test it out. Many contributers on the old Serif forums used to say it did the job pretty well... Affinity has nothing like BookPlus that I can find, although it does have both TOC and Index creation ability. So, I understand this is a brand new product and PagePlus was a multi-tool for publishing. I can still use PagePlus. It works just fine under Windows 10. But year by year it gets older and I want to upgrade to Affinity as soon as it has the tools I need. Does Affinity Publisher have plans to expand into book publication and mail merge? As to functionality in Affinity Publisher, the basics all seem to be there and working. It imports, edits, and exports pdf files. It has the tremendous ability to work across platforms, such as Mac and Windows. Best Regards, Will Highfield, USA

I've always used Serif Pageplus for my business postcard mailings. One thing which was invaluable to me was the import filters for mail merge. However, Pageplus 6 was the last version to feature all those great filters. So, I do all my mail merge projects in PP6. I'm going to be moving to Affinity Publisher when it finally launches. Hopefully you will incorporate mail merge, and include many filters including excel workbooks and open document spreadsheets.