The free account in Canva comes with a few simple animations you can use to breathe some life into your slides. You can use them to add some smooth motion between your slides that looks like this:

Here are a few reasons why you might like animating slides in Canva:

Simplicity. Animating all objects on the slide is just a single click away.

Aesthetics. The animations are smooth, fast, and easy on the eye.

Speed. Animating your entire presentation can happen in less than a minute.

Here are a few reasons why you might prefer animating in PowerPoint:

Lack of timing settings. Canva doesn’t have many effect options that let you set an animation’s timing, delay, and duration. This is important if your story demands that different objects appear at a specific time and not all at once.

No diversity. Canva only has 5 free animations, while PowerPoint has over 45 animations and 48 transitions you can use in any way you want. This gives you a lot more creative freedom in case you want to use motion to drive your story forward, instead of using simple effects just for the sake of it.

Limited control. Unlike Canva, PowerPoint lets you add motion effects to each separate object on your slide. This means You can add multiple animations to the same slide and control the order in which they appear during your presentation.

Let’s show you a few examples of animations and transitions you can use in PowerPoint for a presentation you originally designed in Canva.

Important: Before that, learn how to export your Canva presentation into PowerPoint.

So our Canva-designed presentation is now inside PowerPoint, where we’ve added the Float In animation, which is the equivalent of Canva’s Rise animation.

However, PowerPoint lets you arrange the timings of each separate element. This way, they appear one after another, instead of all at once based on a single action.

You can do this by accessing the Animation Pane and customizing the settings for duration and delay. Also, you can change the starting point of each animation to be either On Click or With Previous.

In this example, all objects are set to start With Previous after the main headline.

Here’s another critical difference between Canva’s transitions and the ones you can build in PowerPoint.

By using transitions like Morph, you can create motion effects that are more engaging for the human brain. How? By taking one element from the current slide and transforming it into an element from the next slide.

This way, your audience stays connected to the content, instead of letting it slip out of their minds, even if it’s for a fraction of a second.

Another advantage of animating your Canva presentation in PowerPoint is having the ability to add motion to different objects using unique effects.

Sometimes the story of your presentation requires the motion to be a bit more diverse and include animations with a different style, starting point, and direction.

Here’s an example of how different elements appear from different directions into the slide. This can depend on multiple factors, such as the shape of the visual elements, where they are placed on the slide, and where they stand in the hierarchy of the slide content.

Yes, animating your presentation in PowerPoint will take a bit more than a minute, unlike in Canva, but the level of audience engagement your slides will generate will be beyond comparison.