AfPub — Fields, Data Merge, and Find and Replace

[MaxClass]

I’ve been using Affinity products for five years now.  My main daily application is Publisher of which I make extensive use of the Data Merge feature to do specialized documents for people.

My first request is to be able to open two (2) separate TSV/CSV files and allow the data from a merged combination of both sets of Fields and Data. I a Mac programmer I would imagine adding the second data files fields to those of the first dictionary or array, however they are used internally. This should be an easy, but very powerful, addition to Publisher.

As for the “Fields Studio” General Information> Date and Time would you please consider adding the options to add and individual way to insert the current individual Day, Month, or Year as individual selections.

Also, the ability to add, using the existing Date and Time option, the ability to make a Date field in a document as auto-updating so that field in a document will automatically display the current Date. This would allow be extremely helpful.

I love the speed of the Find/Replace Studio and the only suggestion I have regarding it is that is show the number of ‘matches’ by showing a visible number, possibly in a non-editable text field to the right of the ‘Replace All’ button. So many times I’m looking for how many matches are found to the Find criteria and not necessarily to change them and currently I have to physically count the number of entries found. Internally a simple incremented counter would do the trick.

Lastly, in Find/Replace it would be nice to have the small ‘x’ inside the circle dosplayed on the right side of the fields to click on and instantly clear the field. This is standard on almost every Mac application that uses “Find”, such as in Safari.

I have recommended the Affinity applications to everyone I know and could not do what I do without them.

Thank you all so much in advance for what you have given us. It’s appreciated far more than you might realize and easily worth a lot more than you ask for this amazing applications.

[walt.farrell]

Just a comment:, @MaxClass:  Please make separate posts for separate requests, as indicated in the guidelines for this section of the forums. That makes it much easier to manage the inevitable discussions and for Serif to track the suggestions.

Quote

• Please just do one suggestion per thread. If your post title is “Here’s a few ideas to improve Affinity Publisher” you’ll be asked to split them up.

 

[Ash]

Hi - thanks for these suggestions. We have added a couple of things you'll be interested in in the 2.2 beta which is available now.
 

 

If you'd like to give it a go you can join our beta program here.