I see a lot of people on social media asking if they should stop using their current software (which is usually PowerPoint) and switch to Prezi so they can make “better presentations.”

You're probably familiar with Prezi because it's been around forever. Canva is great for those kinds of things. Use it for social media graphics, brochures, flyers, and creative stuff. Go ahead and use Canva for everything else. If you are an academic, scientist, researcher, evaluator or similar professional then my recommendation is that you do NOT use Canva for presentations. What did I love about Canva’s presentation feature? Nothing. What did I like about Canva’s presentation feature? Nothing. There’s also a complete lack of necessary data visualization elements and you need to pay to present.

There's no blank slide deck where you can really customize it (you have to create a whole new project, enter the dimensions, and so on. What I didn't like about Canva’s presentation feature was it's all templates. I had to pay! I had to pay just to present?! Nope, not happening. That’s another kiss of death with Canva for me.Īnd then just out of curiosity, because I was already there checking it out, I went to click ‘present’ to check out presenter view because that's also something I think is really important to have work really well.Īnd I could not believe my eyes. So, if you use Canva for presentations, your dataviz won’t be able to follow best practices. I wanted to basically change everything, but you just can't do a lot with the data design. You can't customize the design and the defaults are really not good. You can't really create an effective and engaging presentation with your data using those kinds of templates.Įven though I knew I wasn't going to use Canva, I still I tried out their dataviz because that's something that is very important to us.Īnd I was really disappointed in it.

I don't really have time to get into it in this post, but I'll just let you know that slide templates (e.g., off the shelf built-in templates might look pretty on the surface, but they actually set you up to fail). The fact that it's all templates and you can't customize your own template is why I will never, ever use Canva for presentations. That's actually the kiss of death for me.

The best presentation software for mac