Thanks to Canva, everyone is able to create stunning slideshows, in just a few clicks and at minimal cost. The Pro version of the tool, which unleashes its full power, can be tried for free for 30 days.
Preparing a few presentation slides is a great way to communicate your ideas, whether you are in business or at university. However, it can be difficult to find an authoring program that is complete, affordable and easy to use. In 2013, Canva was launched with the aim of meeting all of these expectations.
Canva is a design tool, available directly on browser, without installation or update necessary. It is also available as an app on the Play Store and Apple Store. It aims to allow users to design professional quality presentation documents without any technical knowledge. It achieves this goal thanks to countless models designed by experts, which can be easily personalized.
Just sign up for a free account on Canva and you’ll see amazing results in minutes. And by choosing the Canva Pro subscription, available free of charge for a 30-day trial, you can:
- expand from over 250,000 to over 610,000 ready-to-use presentation templates;
- expand from over 1 million to over 100 million photos, videos and audio tracks;
- benefit from 1 TB of storage instead of 5 GB to save your presentations;
- access exclusive features, such as the background eraser, automatic image resizing and even new animations.
How do you make an impactful presentation with Canva Pro?
Canva Pro stands out from other tools with its very easy to understand interface, as well as its impressive amount of ready-to-use presentation templates. Users have access to several hundred thousand modern templates. Impossible not to find happiness in this plethoric selection. Rather than starting from an empty page or already seen and reviewed 1000 times, Canva saves considerable time, and allows everyone to express their creativity without specific knowledge.
Starting a free, no-obligation trial of Canva Pro is just a few clicks away. Once on the home screen, it is here that you can launch a new project, or resume a current document. With Canva, everything is saved online, which has the advantage of securing the data and accessing it from any device.
Let’s take the example of an author of novels, who wants to convince publishers to select his new work. To make a beautiful presentation material, all he has to do is click on “Create a design” at the top right of the home screen, then on “Presentation (16:9)”.
At this point, Canva Pro now displays an authoring interface, with a blank first slide in the center. On the left, a toolbar allows you to select a model from hundreds of thousands of references, supplied with new products daily. In order to narrow down the possibilities, a search field allows you to enter the keyword of your choice, such as “finance”, “forest”, “sport”, “electronics”, etc. There is bound to be a template for the domain or subject you are looking for.
In our example, the novel writer is going to choose a template with a nice classic-style font. There is still a little something missing to perfectly obtain the desired literary atmosphere. Why not add a photograph of books in the background of the slide? It’s child’s play: just click on “Items” in the toolbar, then write “Books” in the search field. After finding a photo of your liking from the huge selection, all you have to do is drag and drop it onto the slide.
Our author is now free to modify the text, format his project and date it. Everything is done with the mouse and intuitive keyboard shortcuts: resize text blocks, choose one of the many fonts, select the color…
The first slide is now complete, without special effort or knowledge. All you have to do is move on to the next ones, optionally choose transitions (animated or not) between each slide, and publish everything. The presentation can be shown directly on Canva Pro, or exported in PPT or PDF format if it needs to be sent by email.
What other features does Canva Pro have?
This little hands-on reveals the great strengths of Canva Pro. The tool is rich, deep, with all the essential features one would expect from a professional application. Nevertheless, and this is the difference, everyone has the opportunity to design compelling documents with Canva Pro. This is thanks to the more than 610,000 models available and a very understandable interface.
The other notable advantage is that a library of more than 100 million visual and audio assets is available, as shown in the example. Just select and drag and drop. There is no longer any need to search separately, in image banks where free and non-free elements are mixed. And all this is presented in a web format that allows collaboration; it’s easy to contribute to a colleague’s project and add annotations.
Even better: it’s as easy to create presentations on Canva Pro as it is to design photo albums, resumes, restaurant menus or YouTube intros. For example, our fictitious author could then design the cover of his book, as well as a business card. The tool supports just about anything imaginable when it comes to visual design, with simplicity as its key word. And for a fraction of the price of professional suites: less than 10 euros per month with annual billing.