PowerPoint Has Edge Over Canva for Animations - Part 1

I'm a Canva fan, so am I for PowerPoint. In the previous post I compared Canva with PowerPoint from the angle of ease of use. And in there I briefly mentioned about PowerPoint's superiority over Canva in terms of animations and transitions.

This post and the next will look into this in more detail and seek to explain why PowerPoint is a preferable tool vis-à-vis Canva for creating cool animations.

Let me remind you my work relates to video ads for product display, not presentations. And therefore, my priorities are different from those of many of you.?

So, for me, there're 4 animation features that are crucial.

They are the abilities to control the:

1. Start of an animation
2. Duration of animation
3. Sequence of animation
4. Combining multiple animations

In this Part 1 post, let's see what Canva offers for animation.?

In Canva it's a bit complicated

Let me explain this by first telling you what you get in PowerPoint.?

In PowerPoint you can apply any animations to almost any object, be it text, shape, image, or even a video. You can adjust animations on a slide in micro-seconds, and allow them to occur in any sequence.?

Add to that the ability to apply multiple animations to a single object on one slide.?

With Canva, all of these may just be not possible.?

When using Canva you'll soon find there are 4 different animations sets for 4 types of objects:

1. Page Animations?
2. Element Animations (other than pics / photos)
3. Photo Animations
4. Text Animations

Now, while Page Animations will animate everything on a Page (even the background...), the other 3 animations will work on individual objects on a Page as the case may be.

There is a 5th animation type called, Create an Animation, launched in March this year. This is similar to PowerPoint's Motion Paths, though apparently easier to use compared to latter.

Last but not the least, there's a 6th type as well.

You can use animated elements (mainly GIFs) from the vast stocks that Canva has and collects from sources like Giphy.

And yes, with a little effort, you can make your own GIF too.

With all that in perspective, let's see what you cannot do in Canva, unlike PowerPoint.

You cannot combine animations

Let's say you've one object - a set of texts - on your Page. So, if you're doing Page Animation and then apply animations to the texts, you're going to see 2 animations to the set of texts.?

• One, during the entry OR exit (or both) of the Page.
• And two, the animation you've separately rendered to the texts, again during entry or exit or both.

That, to my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong), is the only way to combine 2 animations (at the most) to a single object.?

You may perhaps not need 'deep' animations often, because as mentioned before, Canva is more for subtle animations suited for social media posts and presentations.

PowerPoint is altogether different in this aspect, meaning you can do any number of animations to a single object at your chosen sequence and duration. More on PowerPoint in the Part 2 post coming next week.

You cannot control duration or sequence

Many Canva users may not agree with me on this. But it's true that you cannot micro-manage duration and/or sequence animations in Canva.

The only options that Canva gives you (at the time of this writing) are:

• Ability to increase or reduce the Speed or Intensity of an animation on a sliding scale (no precise timing, mind you!)
• Allowing some animations to occur 'On enter', 'On exit', or both. Some also have the option to choose 'Reverse exit animation'.
• Adding ready-to-embed animated elements from the library stocks.

If you are like me and want to sequence animations of several objects on a Page, you will likely have 2 ways to do that:

1. Using Page animation followed by selective individual animations.
2. Increasing and/or reducing Speed or Intensity of different objects to give the impression of animation sequence.

Another thing that puts me off in Canva is that it auto-adjusts duration of a Page depending on the duration of animations on each Page. The same thing happens while timing the transitions between Pages.

Using Canva Video Editor

Canva has a free online video editor, and using features like split, crop, trim, and resize clips on the timeline, you may be able to use animations in more sophisticated ways. This is something we're gonna explore in the coming time.?

Canva scores over PowerPoint in this because the latter doesn't have timeline on which to drag in and assemble disparate media clips for making complete videos.

However, PowerPoint does allow you to crop, trim, split, resize media clips separately slide-wise, not on a timeline.

Takeaway

Canva is constantly evolving. The 'Create an Animation' feature is a wonderful add-on in March this year. Earlier it launched Match & Move transition, akin to PowerPoint's Morph transition. In my view, PowerPoint still remains a better tool to create stunning animations, and I find it easier to preview them compared to Canva.

In the Part 2 of this series I'll share my experience of using animations with PowerPoint. See you there.

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