Not blessed with that eye for design? Intimidated by Photoshop? You’re not alone and you are in luck. Canva is a great tool that lets even the most design-challenged individuals create professional looking content without having to be an expert in design or learning a complex new software. Canva lets you easily create countless materials (slides, digital banners, display ads, business cards, etc.) with modern fonts and images. They even allow you to create slides and download them directly into your PowerPoint presentation, something that I personally find very useful.
There are a lot of blogs and articles that compare the two and attempt to offer an opinion on the best solution. In our expert opinion users shouldn’t have to choose between the two. Canva and PowerPoint are two platforms that are great compliments to each other.
For the heavy PowerPoint user, Business Development decks and other deliverables can often look old and boring. Canva isn’t great for content heavy slides or charts, but it is a great tool for accessing modern templates and professional images to incorporate into your PowerPoint presentations.
Canva + PowerPoint + Astute Review = The Perfect Combination
Canva allows you to pull great designs into your exisiting PowerPoints. Unfortunately there is some manual cleanup to get all your fonts, titles and colors aligned with your PowerPoint slides. Fortunately that’s where Astute Review comes in handy. Astute allows users the ability to unify Canva slides with the rest of your PowerPoint presentation with the rest of your presentation in seconds and align with your brand standards.
Create a free Canva Account
Visit Canva’s website and sign up for a free account, it takes 2 minutes.
- The free account has over 8,000 templates. Pro gives you access to 60,000 templates and over 60 million professional images. I use the Pro account to access the additional images and templates. We love PowerPoint, but Canva’s professional images provide an added level of professionalism to your presentations.
- Sign up with your Google or Facebook login.You can also use your own email address.
Start With a Template or Create a Design From Scratch
Can offers hundreds of presentation templates to start with.
Here is an example of how we improved out title slides using the Valiax Networking Template seen in the above image list. You can see how quickly we were able to make a drastic improvement to modernizing our design.
Design Features (Remove Background Example)
Canva’s ability to create content heavy presentations and slidedocs for work does not compare to PowerPoint, but it is great for accessing images and templates, as well as editing photos.
In the below example I remove the background from an image of myself to modernize the look of the slide. PowerPoint’s background removal tool is nowhere near as accurate as Canva.
Other Image Editing
There are so many more options to edit images in Canva when compared to PowerPoint. Removing a background (above) is just one example. Much like Insatgram or any other app on your phone, Canva let’s you:
Easily add add filters
Adjust pictures (brightness, saturation, tints, etc.), and
Other effects to your images (remove background, pixilate, etc.)
Add modern professional images from a library of millions of photos
If you can’t find something in the Canva library there are several other resources for beautiful, FREE professional images.
It’s not for designing content heavy decks, but that’s OK!
Creating content and editing text boxes is extremely defeatured relative to PowerPoint, but that’s OK, Canva should be used for its ability to access the enormous library, edit images, find cool fonts.
When finished, you can download your slides right to PowerPoint and incorporate into your presentation.
That’s it! You’re ready to start making great slides for your work presentations.
Finally, if you’re looking save even more formatting time merging your Canva slides into your PowerPoints, check out Astute Review, it’s spellcheck, but for PowerPoint formatting.
Our software catches makes sure your slides are meticulously formatted and on brand in seconds. Learn how leading consulting firms, like BRG, are using to make sure that all their deliverables are perfectly formatted and on brand.
Want to learn more about how automate finalizing your presentations?
