Quick Fixes: How to Create with Canva If You Are on a Deadline.
On Tips for Professional Presentations.
If you are still relying on Microsoft PowerPoint for your work products, you are missing out on the beauty and ease of creating a well-designed and elegant presentation to wow your co-workers, clients, investors, and your boss in under 30 minutes.
If you have never used Canva before, here is a quick guide to use it under pressure with just the need-to-know basics.
Note: I am assuming you know how to build a story, create a presentation or have a draft in mind.
Step 1. The basics.
Create a free work or personal account on canva.com. Login.
Set all your privacy settings to ‘Off’ as below so no content from your account can be used. This is always a good first step for any SAAS platform.
On the home screen, do a keyword search for the kind of presentation you are building — choose from business plans, SAAS pricing, pitch deck, design pitch, presentation, client presentation, sales, or creative proposal.
Pro-Tip: If you want to post on social media, type in ‘LinkedIn banner’ or ‘Instagram post’ for a pre-sized template designed for that platform.
Scroll down the results to a template you like. The further you scroll the better the choice as the top results are usually, the ‘most popular,’ ‘most used,’ and most adapted choices. If you want to stand out, keep looking.
Pro-tip: Ignore all the ‘Magic’ buttons, and prompts — they are too early for adoption and quite basic.
Hover on the template briefly to see all of the slides in the template in a carousel fashion.
Pro-tip: For advanced users only: you can mix and match slides from different templates to craft your own design in minutes.
For best results on searches, use the tool menu on the left, click on Design, and in the mini-search bar, select ‘Design’ and type in your ideal kind of template — for instance, ‘white minimalist’ will fetch you results closer to your design need. Or ‘professional business plan’ or ‘consulting marketing plan’
Pro-Tip: if you wish to only see free designs and images, use the filter menu on the left to select ‘Free’ though it is easier to just see which ones say Paid/Pro on the designs themselves in the results.
Step 2. Customization
Once you find a template you like, click on it and then select ‘Customize this template.’
Select ‘Add All Pages.’
Once you have your chosen template’s slides open, visit each slide and edit the text.
To change fonts or colors, click on the text, choose the font, size, and color and change it in one shot.
Pro-tip: Import your draft powerpoint presentation to jumpstart the design though I find selecting a design template and then importing just the text works faster if you are under pressure.
The painful process in Powerpoint is having to labor over formatting — ensure spacing, fonts, sizes, alignments are perfect which adds hours to creating a deck for a major presentation.
Formatting alignment is built-in based on the template you choose, so you can simply focus on the topic and story you are creating.
With Canva, you can create professional designed presentation within 20 to 30 minutes and focus the rest of the time on your dry runs, honing your presentation skills, validating your story, and ensuring you are prepared to achieve the outcomes you wish.
Pro-tip: To apply the font, size, and color change to the rest of the slide or to all the slides, select ‘Change All’ on the bottom of left side-bar formatting menu.
Step 3. Save and export.
Save as PDF, flatten (for design and links to be preserved) and download.
If you have chosen all free elements, this is a cinch.
If you have by accident chosen a pro design, then you have two choices.
For a one-time free draft, click on Upgrade, select the ellipsis (…) menu, and choose, download a draft watermark-free version.
On the paid plan, you can also download or export to Powerpoint.
Voila! You have an elegant and formatted presentation you can be proud of in under 30 minutes.
Bonus Tips
If you need to size logos, branding for newsletters, or your website, search for templates with the sizing specified. All Substack assets can be created in Canva for your publication.
Canva has flexible pricing and you can pay for a month to get the pro design templates.
Need advanced or custom help or need to storyboard your presentation? DM me here or at hellotechmadesimple@proton.me.
I love Canva! As a graphic designer and Canva coach, it's made design so accessible for people!
Canva has been one of my TOP favorite tools/apps for the last 4 years now. I use it every time I work on my content elevation. I have been following Canva's success journey for sometime and full power to them Thanks for sharing this one, Jayshree.