Canva for Presentations - Deep Dive [And No Bullshit Review]

First of all I want to say that generally I love Canva and use it almost daily for creating images or animations for videos. I think they have the best background remover and image upscaler.

So anything you read in this review of Canva as a presentation tool is coming from a place of love. 

You can already tell, this is not going to end well for Canva. Let's start and rip the band aid off right away. 

The generation process with Canva

A promising prompt window is asking me to step into the magic design world of Canva.  Because I want to compare all presentation software based on the same assignment, I always use the same no-fluff prompt: AI tools for SMEs. The generation process is super quick; I'm presented right away with two categories and various sub-choices:

Category 1: Completely AI-generated presentations (Magic Design)

Category 1: The magic design is not as magical as the name suggests. It's more like my little nephew showing me a card trick than a Houdini (no offense to my nephew though).

What Canva's magic design generates for a deck is absolutely basic. Out of seven slides, only two slides are actually talking about AI for SMEs; the rest are utility pages such as contact info, a cover page, a famous quote, and a team intro page. And although the content is relevant to AI, it is very very general and there are no more than three sentences on each page. 

Category 2: Templates with an AI theme 

Simply does just the typical Canva thing: provides a template for you to adjust. No AI included whatsoever, so please excuse if I ignore this section completely going forward.

Canva additional features and hacks

I have a few options to adorn or extend my deck:

Using Magic Write, you can generate more copy about AI tools for SMEs and then add it wherever you want to. But first, let's use the "Add your voice"; this is an option that lets you add different tones of voice so that the LLM can sound like you or like a client you are creating the slides for. 
Simply copy and paste a longer text into the tool and save the new voice. Let's take a look at the machine-generated writing.

Plus point: The text is well structured, relevant, and makes perfect sense, although I don't think the tone of voice is as personable as mine (but maybe that's too much to ask from AI at this point, and maybe I am way too biased and my writing is not personable at all). 

What I don't like too much is that you are "left alone" with the design when inserting the text. Where Gamma would help place the content, with Canva, you have to freestyle it, and with that, you can destroy the beautiful formatting. At least I would. But you, dear reader, might have a better eye for design. Now if this wasn't personable?! 

Another option I can choose is to match the whole deck to my brand styles. In my case, I have added the brand colours of my website, which changes the background color and font of every slide my brand colours. Doesn’t sweep me off my feet…

Canva for presentations PROS

If I really want to dig for something great to say of Canva's presentation feature, I'd highlight that the deck generation was super quick (but to be honest I could have waited a few seconds longer if that would mean I get a real deck out of it).

The images it added were very relevant to the topic of AI. It's integrated image generator is ok: not great, not meh. 

Canva for presentations compared to other tools

Gamma’s presentation on its dashboard

My fandom to Gamma is even more cemented now because their software can do so much more: the deck Gamma (find the full presentation on the comparison page) has created from the same prompt is almost a ready-to-go presentation.

It has much more content, specifically AI-generated images for your topic, the templates are much more relevant and it supports you much with the formatting and designing of your template. And also the AI-generated text was much more relevant and elaborate than Canva's.

Where Canva has a clear upper hand over Gamma is its vast library of graphics, icons, frames, and such. Canva is simply built for (non-professional) design, but I'd say that adding little gimmicks into your presentation is not a priority.

So my presenter's heart will continue to belong to Gamma and the designer's heart to Canva. Fair?

Other relevant content

Deep dive into Gamma for presentations

Comparison of Presentation Tools 

Image generator comparison (Canva included)

Blog: Improve Your Presentations and Get Your Boss To Do What You Want