As part of a design studio wide project, everyone delved into Canva to develop their own version of a presentation, everyone working from the same 10 slide presentation outline. Canva had good features for presentation design which were intuitive to use, fast processing (Canva is a web-based app, and I was working on a 300mbps fiber optic connection, so a fast response time was expected), and capable software package.

Here is my presentation, developed entirely with Canva. Download the PDF version Here

Comparing the presentation design workflow between Canva and PowerPoint (desktop version), I would prefer PowerPoint. Canva has a simple feature set and for a business presentation like this one, it was a source of frustration and lots of extended formatting. A few examples are: 

  • Canva does not have table formatting. So slides 3 and 9 required a lot of additional formatting time vs. developing same slide in PowerPoint. Slide 3 required additional time to think through a layout for the content that was not a quick table – in this instance the result is visually better than a standard PowerPoint table. Slide 9 was just painful to manually add the 4 column backgrounds, the 4 top dividers and 7 separate text boxes.
  • Canva has single text formatting style per text placeholder. This requires a lot of additional formatting time vs. ability to vary text styling. As example, slide 4 needed 4 text placeholders vs. 2 I would have used in PowerPoint.
  • Canva has limited bar chart styling and formatting options. Slide 5’s bar chart worked well for this presentation, but I had to make some concessions on the overall design to stay within the Canva options. There are only 4 bar chart styling options and complex data will quickly go beyond the Canva capabilities.

On the praise side, the web-based Presenter View capability is really fantastic coding. The variety and depth of “templates” is very impressive (although they do not meet my definition of what a full template is). The variety of font options, color scheme options, and sharing options all are impressive. 

I am certain the future will have requests for developing presentations in Canva and from this internal project, our design team is ready to take on those requests and develop professional slide decks.

Troy @ TLC