Most people use Microsoft PowerPoint as their go-to presentation design tool, since it has been a steady resource from Microsoft for over 35 years. But what you may not be aware of is that Canva actually provides much better ways to create presentations than PowerPoint. There are many great hidden features in Canva , some of which relate to presentation design. But no longer are these tips hidden - you can make your best presentations using Canva from now on.
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7 Live presentation links and PDF options
Easy to create, edit, share, and present your Canva deck
For a live presentation, you can directly open your presentation as a link from Canva using four different Present options: Present full screen, Presenter view, Present and record, or Autoplay. It allows you to keep the document live for future editing without re-downloading it, share the presentation to remote workers needing to present it, or free up space on your hard drive by presenting from the cloud rather than from local storage.
Once you've created a presentation using Canva, there are also different ways to save or share it. If you've added video, live links, or animations to your presentation, you still have the option of downloading it as a standard PDF, MP4 video, or other format, depending on the requirements you need.
6 Team collaboration made easy
Canva Teams makes light work of group presentations
Canva Teams is one of the many subscription options in Canva. Firstly, there's Canva's free service, in which you can create presentations with no major limitations without paying. Secondly, there's Canva Pro -- this service costs $14.99 per month, but provides unlimited use of all elements, templates, and design features. It also includes AI tools with no limits or higher limits than the free plan does.
Canva Teams, however, is the service you should use if you're creating presentations for work or if you do a lot of group projects. It allows multiple people to edit the document, collaborate, comment, and more. This costs $30 per month to subscribe to.
If you're a student or teacher, you can get the Canva Education plan, which is free for educators. These also include collaboration tools for joint presentations.
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5 Make branded presentations with Brand Kit
Keep everything consistent with your brand
Canva's Brand Kit feature is one of the best ways to keep the designs in your presentations consistent with your business brand. Whether you're using a corporate brand or a personal one, branded presentations convey trust and authority.
With Canva's Brand Kit, you can upload and save brand assets such as logos, colors, fonts, tone of voice, image styles, and much more all in one central hub. For further insurance that your brand is never misused by other people with access to it, Brand Kit also provides the ability to leave your brand guidelines and usage guides -- this lets the designer explain how, when, and where to use logos, elements, colors, and font types, to ensure no one goes off track in your marketing presentations.
Even if you use different templates and layouts for each presentation, the ability to easily apply your brand to any presentation immediately brings it back to being yours. You can apply your Brand Kit in seconds with Canva's AI, which saves time and ensures everything is as it should be.
Canva Brand Kit is a feature of Canva Pro and Canva Teams. It can't be accessed by Canva Free users, but you might find it in Canva alternative software .
4 Animate your presentations in Canva
Without the cringy, overused transitions of PowerPoint history
Canva's animation tool covers a grand variety of animations. You can use it to animate individual elements within your presentations, as well as ways to transition between slides to create a more engaging view for your audience.
In 2023, Canva introduced the animate on a path feature, so you can draw a path on which your element will animate around your page. This customized animation type is more personal than anything offered within PowerPoint.
You can choose to animate elements upon click or from the start of each slide, and within that, you can animate on entry, exit, or on loop (or a combination of all three) per individual element. There are over 20 animation options for individual elements, and a further 20 options for page and transition animations.
3 Canva's AI features do a ton of the work
AI suggestions for templates, elements, and animation
In October 2024, Canva announced "Droptober" which contained all-new AI tools and features across the Canva suite, including its Presentation hub.
Droptober also featured pre-existing tools as part of Canva's new UI. These include tools such as Magic Write, which is Canva's AI chat and writing generator. With Magic Write, you can generate the text for your entire presentation, or you can use the tool to re-write your own words to work better for the presentation's purpose. Magic Write also features translations to over 130 languages, so your presentations can easily go global.
Not only can you use the Magic Write AI tools, but any other Canva AI design tools work in the Presentation hub, too. You can add or edit your images using its generative AI, Magic Media, or you can use its auto-animate tool for smart animation, saving you time.
2 Use the abundance of Canva templates
Let the design be taken care of, so you can focus on the content
Even though I have a design background, I do not particularly enjoy creating presentations. Especially those which are built for short-term use but still need to be engaging.
I first used Canva's presentation templates when I was teaching first-year English at a university. I needed templates to engage my students, but they didn't need to be branded, nor did they need to be reused time and time again. I did not want to spend hours on them when I needed a new presentation twice per week.
Canva templates allowed my presentations to look professionally designed, aesthetically pleasing, and let me build my content onto them easily. Along with templates are also Canva Apps which work similarly to Figma plugins for increasing your workflow as they create nice elements within your presentations.
You can choose templates based on the topic of your intended presentation, but there's nothing stopping you from putting your own content onto a seemingly irrelevant design subject either. Use the templates as a creative starting block.
1 Docs to Decks feature
Easily and quickly turn your detailed documents into pre-designed presentations
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Canva's Docs to Decks feature is surely one of the best reasons you should use Canva to design your presentations. Often, presentations are built from previous documentation we've created for other projects or from our initial research. Why rewrite everything twice from document to presentation, when you can just click a button to do that for you?
The best part is that Docs to Decks will pre-design your presentation based on your content. You can also still choose from a variety of templates to apply your document content to, if you prefer.
The feature isn't perfect -- sometimes the layouts are a little sparse or don't make sense for the content -- but it saves a ton of time in the long run, even if you have to go through and make some small changes.
Canva presentations are professional, fun, and easy to create
Canva's built-in artistic and design-minded elements make creating presentations fun for both the creator and the audience viewing it. With a nearly unlimited library of presentation templates, animated transitions, and font options, you'll have the choice of making unique and engaging presentations every time. Canva offers multiple ways of viewing, sharing, collaborating, and saving presentations, giving you more options and choices than you have when using PowerPoint.
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