2025 brought us the joining of Canva and Affinity. Make A digital Planner with Affinity Studio, it’s so much easier! This is huge for digital and printable planner creators. Affinity Studio allows us to design professional level digital planners, and printable planners. You have no idea how excited I was to see this!
A total bonus is that Affinity Studio still allows for the Data Merge capability, but it has added amazing new features to the data merge tool.
The Free Affinity Studio includes all the tools a planner creator needs and they are free.
Can you tell I’m excited!
Can I Use My Affinity Publisher Files in Affinity Studio?
This gets a big resounding yes! I have a meal planner template that I use every year for myself, and I sold it as a PLR template for Affinity Publisher. I used this to make my 2026 Meal Planner for myself in Affinity Studio, and it worked wonderfully!
I have migrated most of my templates from Affinity Publisher to Affinity Studio Layout and I haven’t had any issues yet. This process has gone incredibly smooth.
I have also used my Planner Data Wizard +G Links to merge dates and links and it worked like a dream. I was really worried that the free Affinity Studio wouldn’t work with the tools I had created, but it all worked like a charm!
Data Merge for hyperlinks and dates in Affinity Studio is acutally easier than in Affinity Publisher.
Improvements to Affinity Studio
There are so many improvements! But I’m going to focus on the Data Merge improvements because that is my bread and butter.
The biggest improvements I have noticed are:
- The Data Merge Panel is now a sidebar pannel that you can keep pinned
- You can now view the data from right inside Affinity Suite
- The Insert Field now filters to the data table you work working with!
I will admit I’m not the biggest fan of the dark interface. It takes me back to the 80’s with the black terminal screens with green text. I would walk away from the computer and everything would be pink for hours. But overall the new Affinity Studio rocks for making digital planners.
On the other hand Affinity has somewhat improved it’s documentation, so I can live with the dark layout.
The New Data View in Affinity Studio
The new data view gives you the ability to see your data right in the application, so no need to go back and forth to see which rows you need. I love this! And it saves so much time. Take a peak below to see the new data view, I’m using my Data Planner Wizard+G to import the Dates and Hyperlinks into my meal planner.
This new data view is amazing. I love the ability to filter the records and see what I’m getting, and you can even change the source right at the top of the page. This is so helpful, because I typicall use the Monthly tab 3 times. And for the weekly and daily tabs of the spreadsheet I use them once. So I will often have 4-5 data sources for one planner.
This means I need to make sure the filters I’m using give me the correct records for each source. I have made the mistake of setting the wrong filters… talk about an ugly mess post merge.
Make a Digital Planner with Affinity Studio – Recommended!
I am making the switch to Affinity Suite for all my digital planner creation. New templates will be relaeased using the Affinity Suite and I’m making some updates for 2026 in the Affinity Course I have because Affinity Suite is amazing!
Let’s get you started with this process with the Digital Planner Creator’s Quick-Start Toolkit
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