The new Canva Documents has a bunch of neat tools including the AI writing tool that I highlighted last week. Continuing on that theme of artificial intelligence, Canva now has a feature that lets you quickly turn a document into a slideshow presentation. 

When you viewing a document in Canva take a look at the upper-right corner of the screen and you’ll notice a “convert” button. When you click that button Canva will generate a set of slideshows based on your document. You can preview all of the slideshows they generate before you choose one to apply to your document. Once you’ve chosen a slideshow from the list of automatically generated ones, you can edit the automatically generated slideshow. 

There are a few things to note about Canva’s document-to-slideshow conversion tool. First, it’s still in beta so there will probably be some quirks. Second, your document must have headers in it. Each header becomes its own slide. Third, the slides don’t have any pictures added to them unless your document had pictures in it (you can manually add pictures to the slides after the slideshow is generated). 

Video – How to Use Canva to Convert a Document Into a Slideshow

Applications for Education
The document-to-slideshow conversion feature in Canva could be helpful if you already have an outline of a presentation and want to quickly turn it into a slideshow. I see this being helpful to folks like me who have years of outlines of notes I’ve given to my U.S. History classes.