I love keyboard shortcuts. Making things happen in Affinity Publisher in less than a second and not even touching the mouse or trackpad never gets old.

The trick is keyboard shortcuts. But not just any keyboard shortcuts though, instead a custom set of shortcuts to access your personally most used features.

Affinity Publisher ships with a huge range of shortcuts. I found that not everything I do multiple times a day had a shortcut assigned. This is not a showstopper as all the shortcuts are user configurable in the app's Preferences. Here are the 5 that I added to save time:

Vector Crop

I use the Vector Crop tool all the time and using the mouse to activate was annoying when it was the 50th time in a day! I assigned the letter R to the Vector Crop tool and never looked back.

Hyperlinks

In almost every app capable of adding hyperlinks to a document the shortcut key is Command & K (Control & K on Windows) but not Affinity Publisher. I configured this and now adding a Hyperlink is second nature.

Show/Hide Left Studio Panel

While the TAB key hides the entire Affinity Publisher interface and is great for previewing, sometimes I just need a little more room to work. Adding a shortcut of Control & [ to toggle only the Left Studio Panel provides that additional space.

Show/Hide Right Studio Panel

Similarly, adding a shortcut of Control & ] to toggle only the Right Studio Panel provides even more additional space.

Shortcuts for Text Styles

Some Text Styles are pervasive irrespective of the type of document you are creating: Heading 1, Heading 2, Body, Bold and more. Many apps use Command & Option & a number for Headings. Setting a standard range of dedicated Text Style shortcuts boosts your ability to quickly format text exponentially. Here are mine:

• Command & Option & 1 - Heading 1

• Command & Option & 2 - Heading 2

• Command & Option & 3 - Heading 3

• Command & Option & 9 - Body

• Command & Option & 8 - Bullet

• Command & Option & 0 - Clear Styles