Canva vs PowerPoint - Things You Should Know
Partha Bhattacharya
Making nicely animated ads in Canva & PowerPoint??? Founder at VidBazaar
Both Canva and PowerPoint are graphic design tools loved and used by millions. Both have features that are common, yet there are some that Canva has but not PowerPoint, and vice-versa.
As someone using both for a while to make multi-product video ads, I’m gonna compare some cool Canva features in this article vis-à-vis PowerPoint's with the goal of helping new users for designing graphics.
Canva makes you a designer in minutes
When you open Canva, you suddenly find that you're in the thick of the things in minutes. Literally!
As you click 'Create a design' at top right, the dropdown opens instantly. And you'll be surprised to see what all you can design with Canva.?
Click on one (any) of them - let's say Flyer - and off you go.
The new window greets you with hundreds of designs / templates on the left panel. Select a template that you appeals to you, and you're a designer!
Within minutes!
With PowerPoint it isn’t that easy. Yes, you get some ready-to-use templates, not many though, but it always feels like starting from scratch. Unlike Canva!?
This happens because Canva being a 'young' tool, its UI (User Interface) is programmed in such a way that it immediately puts the user completely at ease.
Plus it has an enviable stock of 250K+ templates (610K+ for Canva Pro users) ready for use.
PowerPoint does provide stock items like images, icons, illustrations, stickers, cutouts of people and so on but still they are not as plenty as Canva’s. People still view PowerPoint as a presentation tool only, which is unfortunate if you ask me.?
But that I believe isn't gonna change anytime soon because PowerPoint is a tool of an old era when social media designing was deep in the womb of the future.?
Having said that, once you scratch the surface, you'll find that PowerPoint is sufficiently modernized and enabled to create stunning social media graphics to boost your revenue.?
Drag-n-Drop
This is ONE Canva feature that never leaves you stranded. Whether you wanna change a pre-designed template or start from beginning, you’re only a click-n-drag away from adding or changing an element on your Page.
As mentioned above, the work interface is intuitive and user friendly. If you make any mistake – which always happens no matter how experienced you are – simply undo your last action(s) and go back to where you feel you can start afresh.
Animated elements ready for use
In Canva you can work with animations –
Remember, much of the animation things are available only to Pro users. Also, some are still work-in-progress.
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PowerPoint is much superior to Canva in terms of animations and transitions though the latter is assiduously trying to catch up.
For example, you can render only one animation to an element in Canva as against multiple animations to one element in PowerPoint.?
Canva however has ready stocks of pre-designed animated elements (mainly GIFs), and this outshines PowerPoint by a wide margin.
Bring content from everywhere
With Canva you can source design elements from Giphy, YouTube, Iconduck, Tint, Brandfetch, Pixton, Stipop, and many more (along with Pixabay and Pexels). You can also import media contents directly from Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, Google Photos, Slidecast, Brandfolder, Dropbox, and others.
What’s more, Canva gives you a cool embed option, and using this you can simply copy+paste web links to your media files and bring in contents from Vimeo, SoundCloud, Spotify, Tumblr, Codepen, Flickr, Pinterest, YouTube, TED, and more.
Curiously, PowerPoint has a prIde of place in Canva.
You can import from as well as export to PowerPoint while preserving layers, giving excellent opportunities to designers like me to make beautiful video ads in both.
Try our templates bundles at the Creative Market store - you'll love them.
Post to social media
PowerPoint offers no way to post your works directly to social media, which is a bit surprising in this day and time (newly launched Microsoft Designer seeks to address this – more on this in a later article).
Canva scores big on social media sharing. Not only can you post on platforms like Tik Tok, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and so on, you can even schedule your posts.
Let me admit though, I haven’t used social media posting from Canva yet, but to know you can do that from right inside Canva is a huge thing.
Conclusion
There is a lot more to Canva than what is covered here. It's constantly re-inventing and renovating. To be fair, PowerPoint is also changing a lot, for better.
As a designer, it's but rare that you'll confine yourself to using just one or two of them. I use both to create animated video ads, plus a few others.
Coming back to where I started, Canva is a rare tool that has almost no learning curve to get started.
So, why wait? Dip your toes today!
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