Visual How-To Book Design Software: Pros, Cons, and Templates
Designing a visual “how-to” book, whether it’s a cookbook, craft guide, DIY manual, or tutorial workbook, means thinking carefully about both content and layout.
Clear step-by-step instructions, photos, diagrams, and callouts all depend on a page design that supports how readers actually use your book.
There’s no single “right” software for this kind of project. Instead, there are several tools that can work well, each with its own strengths, limitations, and learning curve.
In this article, we’ll look at the most popular options and how they stack up for design-heavy, instructional interiors.
We’ll walk through:
- The pros and cons of each program for visual how-to books
- Key features that matter for tutorials (like master pages, styles, tables of contents, and indexes)
- Where to find templates you can adapt to your own project
By the end, you’ll have a clearer sense of which tool fits your goals, your budget, and your comfort level, and how templates can help you get a professional-looking result more quickly.
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Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is not design software. Nor is it graphic software, but it has some interesting design capabilities, and many of us already have it installed on our computers even if we don’t use it.
PowerPoint allows users to adjust the slide size so that they can work within their chosen trim size. It is user-friendly with a low learning curve. Users can insert and adjust images, add text boxes, adjust typeface and font style, move elements around on the work surface, and add simple shapes and symbols.
A major advantage of PowerPoint is the Slide Master functionality. Slide masters allow users to make design choices for their work in one place and have them at the ready for each page. Users can set typeface and font style choices, create dependable page layouts, set background colors, and add any background elements they want to include on every slide.
That said, PowerPoint isn’t publishing software, and there are some downsides. One is the inability to create a table of contents or an index for your book automatically. The outline view can help cut down your work by giving you a list of all the slide headings, but you will need to manually input your page numbers.
Blaine has created a basic cookbook template as part of the Cookbook Design Lab that you can use to kick-start your design. You can also find templates at SlidesGo.com. Many of the templates are free, though others require a SlidesGo subscription. Many of these templates are 30 or more pages, giving you all the layouts you need. Make sure you review the terms of use of any template you use.
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word isn’t ideal for complex, visual “how‑to” interiors, but if it’s the tool you know best, you can still produce a clean, usable layout with some planning.
Start by setting your page size and margins to match your printer’s trim and margin specifications (via the Layout menu) before you do any design work; changing these later can break your layout. It also helps to turn on paragraph marks and the navigation pane so you can see hidden formatting and jump quickly between sections.
The most important habit in Word is to rely on Styles instead of manual formatting. Set up and consistently use styles for your chapter titles, headings, body text, callouts, and step text, rather than changing fonts and sizes by hand. This keeps your design consistent, lets you update typography across the whole document from one place, and enables automatic tables of contents.
Images are where Word often becomes frustrating, so insert them through the Insert → Pictures menu instead of copy-paste, and immediately set an appropriate text wrapping option. Simple, repeatable layouts—such as an image above the text or to one side with text wrapping—tend to behave better than complex arrangements. Avoid constantly dragging images around the page; minor text edits can cause everything to shift if the wrapping and positioning aren’t set carefully.
You can find templates to start with directly inside of Microsoft Word when creating a new file if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription.
Where Word shines is in features like automatic tables of contents and indexes, which are especially useful for non-fiction and instructional books. They don't have as many features as the professional tools, but as long as you’ve used heading styles consistently, you can generate and update a table of contents with just a few clicks, and similarly create an index by marking key terms.
However, if your book relies on intricate, highly visual layouts with lots of images, shapes, or layered elements, Word will work against you more often than not. In those cases, PowerPoint, Canva, or especially Affinity or Adobe InDesign will give you better control and a smoother design experience.
Canva
Canva is primarily a social media design program. While you can use it for print projects, it is not really publishing software, so there are some downsides to using it. Still, Canva is more beginner-friendly than the more professional tools, like Affinity Suite or Adobe InDesign, and takes relatively little time to learn.
The page by page functionality of Canva is very similar to PowerPoint. Users add text boxes and images, move them around the page, and adjust background colors just as they do in PowerPoint.
Unfortunately, Canva does not have a design master functionality similar to PowerPoint’s slide master.
That doesn’t mean that all is lost if you want to make a universal change. If you want to change the typeface, for example, simply adjust in one slide. Before you exit the typeface selection pane, the software will give an option to transform all instances of the former typeface into the new typeface.
This can pose problems, however, if multiple elements on each page use the same typeface. Fanciful typefaces in a cookbook, for example, may work well for recipe names, but not well for a recipe’s instructions. Therefore, I recommend careful planning in the initial design phases.
Canva’s template library includes a handful of templates on different cookbook or How To topics, though most are only available for Pro users. However, I found several attractive templates online, most from Etsy. Many templates are 40 or more pages and many include multiple layouts for the front cover, for the introduction, for section breaks, and for recipes.
Some templates can be used in multiple programs, while some are specific to Canva. Many of these templates can be used with a free Canva account; no need for a Pro account. Expect to pay anywhere from $5.00 to $40.00 for a template.
Affinity Suite by Canva
Affinity Suite is a local application you can download for free and run directly on your computer that includes all of 3 of the previous Affinity software applications, including Affinity Publisher. It is professional design software intended specifically for creating print media.
While the learning curve is higher than for PowerPoint or Canva, the functionality of Affinity makes tackling that learning curve worthwhile for those who plan to create multiple design-heavy publications.
Affinity allows users to create Master Pages, similar to creating slide masters in PowerPoint. One advantage of Affinity is the ability to update text styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) across the entire project at once. Affinity also allows users to customize the relationship between text and images, so if you want to get a little more fancy with shapes and imagery, Affinity might be your go-to software.
Another very important feature of Affinity in a non-fiction book context is the ability to create and update tables of contents and indexes.
There are only a handful of Affinity templates online compared to other applications, and Envato is probably one of the best places to find them. That said, you can open Adobe InDesign files which are quite plentiful. You will need to find them in the newer IDML format, however, because some InDesign files are saved in INDD format. This older proprietary format is limited to InDesign and can not be opened using Affinity.
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is the traditional publishing industry’s go-to tool for designing books, magazines, and other print media. In many ways, it’s similar to Affinity Suite: both are professional layout programs with master pages, powerful text styles, fine control over typography, and robust options for combining text and images. The biggest differences are cost, ecosystem, and industry adoption.
InDesign is subscription-based, and can be paid for on it's own or as part of a bundle with the rest of Adobe's software. Affinity Suite is now free (as of October 2025) with additional AI tools included if you already have a Canva Pro subscription.
InDesign also integrates with other Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator, which can be a real advantage if you’re already using those tools for image editing or illustration. (Though Affinity includes their pixel and vector editing apps as all part of the same application now.
InDesign also tends to be updated frequently and is widely supported by printers, designers, and typesetters; if you ever plan to hand your source files off instead of a PDF to a freelance designer or a traditional publisher, they are very likely to expect InDesign files.
For most indie authors creating their own visual how-to books, Affinity Publisher will offer comparable functionality at a lower price, especially if you’re working solo. However, if you see yourself collaborating with traditional publishing professionals, working in design studios, or building a long-term workflow around Adobe’s creative tools, InDesign is the more established, industry-standard choice.
There are plenty of book templates available online for InDesign pretty much everywhere; Etsy, Envato, Freepik, Dribble, and more. It is the industry standard.
Choosing Your Software
Overall, if you plan to do several how-to or other books with layout challenges, you might consider spending some time learning Affinity or Adobe InDesign. If you are just dipping your toes in to see if you enjoy these kinds of projects, you may choose to use Microsoft PowerPoint, Canva, or even Microsoft Word.
By the way, if you want additional training on how to use all of the software above, we do have specific trainings and courses for each one, which you can find here:
We also featured Powerpoint, Canva, and Affinity in Module 3 of the Cookbook Design Lab if you would like a practical look at using them for non-fiction how-to books, as well as a starting template for cookbooks if you'd like to see how they work.
If you are new to design, you might want to find an attractive template that you can use and customize in the software of your choice. Be sure to read the software specifications of the template and the terms of use for the template or the marketplace. While a template might seem like a waste of money, it can give you page layouts and color suggestions that will start your book off on the right foot.
