How to use Canva (Tips and Tricks)

I’ve got new Canva hacks for you these are features I think you’re going to love, love, love.

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🕒Timestamps🕒
3:24 Canva talking presentations recordings
9:16 Canva video IG stories + YouTube intros
14:46 Canva music
16:07 Uploading audio
17:15 Curved text
18:50 Background remover
21:14 Canva print (mugs, canvasses, t shirts + more)

How to Use Canva (Tips and Tricks) – Video Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the live stream, whether you are joining live with me now, or if you’re catching us on the replay. In this video, I’m going to be walking you through my Canva tips and tricks.

These are Canva features that you may or may not be aware of, but they’re really cool features that I would love to highlight to you today. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help you build your business using video on social media with ease.

Now make sure that you check out the links in the description, because I’m going to go back and put all the timestamps, and you’re going to want to check out the timestamps because I’ve got a lot of content that I’m going to cover today.

And also please, please leave a comment below if you are watching the replay, if you’re on the chat, say hello and ask any questions and I’ll answer them the best that I can. Really excited about today’s tutorial because I’m a big fan of Canva, I have a lot of tutorials where I walk you through how to use Canva.

And there are so many features that people just aren’t aware of. I thought, why not? You know, now no time like the present than to show you some of these really amazing features. Let’s get right into it. I’m going to go over to the computer now and that’s all working.

Thank goodness. And let’s get right into Canva. I’m going to put a link in the description, which gives you a free trial to Canva pro for 45 days. The regular trial is 30 days, but if you go through my link, you get it for 45 days.

Make sure you check that out because I’m going to be talking about some free and some paid features as well, but either way, I’m going to show you some stuff and we’re going to have a lot of fun. Let’s talk about some of the features of Canva that I love, some tips and tricks.

And something that I, that they implemented this year, that I think is absolutely stunning, is they’ve got something called talking presentations, right? If you’re in Canva and you use any of their Canva templates and you can access their templates from the search bar in the top here, or you can use, you know, their mega menu, or you can scroll, you know, with some of their categories here.

Either way, however, you want to get to the designs, I’m going to type in presentation in the search bar because everyone’s used to the search bar. Google has taught us how to use a search bar. I’m going to select presentation. One of the most amazing features of their templates is talking presentations.

And now that we’ve got a template actually loading, I love Canva because you’ve got so many templates and no one, or I don’t like to decide to design from scratch ’cause ain’t nobody got time for that. And to be honest, I’m not the best designer anyway.

I love that they’ve got templates that you can work with. And their template designers, whoever they are, whoever you are out there, Canva template designers for presentations, they’ve done a phenomenal job because the people who’ve created these templates really understand the nuances of presentations and how, you know, how to structure the text and how to make it minimal so that you can focus on the content.

Anyway, I digress. If you pick any of the templates here and you build out your presentation, just by clicking on that, what I really love with this, and you may not be aware of it, is they’ve got the ability for you to present and for you to actually show yourself as well.

I’m going to remove myself from the screen for now. And I’m going to remove this overlay because after you’ve created your presentation, if you go to the top right-hand corner here, and then we go to present and record, this is a really cool feature, which you may not be aware of.

Let’s click on that now, then it’s going to ask us to go to the recording studio and this will open up. It will ask you to choose a camera so I’m going to choose a better camera and it will, oh, ask you to also choose your microphone. And then when you start recording, you’ll see there’s a countdown and watch what happens now.

You’ve got my little head here. It’s a little bit weirdly stretched for no reason. But then like I can continue to talk and talk and talk to the presentation on the top right-hand here, well, on the top left here you can see that it’s recording this screen and you can see like, there is this timer, right, as I’m presenting. I would go through the presentation.

You can see me in the bottom corner here and I’ll continue to present the information. Talk. It’s recording the screen. It’s recording the video of myself as a circle, even though it’s stretched for no reason. And it’s also recording the audio as well.

You can go through the presentation, keep talking, keep talking through the slides, keep being amazing. If you need to stop the recording for whatever you can click pause so that, you know, you can go take a sip of water.

You can go to the bathroom for an emergency stop, or you can cough if you are like me and always seem to be coughing during the most important times when you don’t, when you don’t need to be coughing and then you can just resume it and then continue to present.

And once you’ve finished going through all of your slides, you would simply click end recording, right? And now what happens? What’s happening now is Canva is uploading this presentation with you presenting as a little circle picture, as well as all of that content.

And what they will provide us with is a link, which you can then share to other people, right? It’s not a video that you can download, but it is a link of content that you can share, whether that’s sharing it with your colleagues, sharing that with other people in your team, sharing it with whoever you share things with. This is taking a little while and I’m just going to add myself back here.

Hopefully, that’s not being strange. The circle of me are a bit weird. I’m going to remove myself for now. And now you can see that if I copy this link and I open it, what I’ll be able to see is that presentation that I just watched.

You’ve got people, who’ve got the link if they’re my friends, my colleagues and my team, they can watch it, they can pause it on the right-hand side here. They can go double speed if I’m talking really slowly and they want to get through the content faster, they can scrub it.

And this is such a great way of creating content really quickly. I absolutely love that this feature. It’s called the Canva talking head function. And it’s available to you using their presentation templates. And, you know, for you, once you’ve finished, you can either get rid of the recording or you can copy the link and send it to someone here, or you can go back to editing and that will take you back to the main Canva section that you were working from there.

That’s the amazing Canva talking presentations. I don’t know, people are really aware of this feature because it’s available for both free and paid users as well. And it’s a great way of, you know, recording content really quickly so you don’t need to bust out any additional software in order to record you doing a presentation.

And it looks really good. That’s probably one of the best tips and tricks that they released this year. And not many people really know about it.

That’s the first one. Now, let’s talk a little bit more about video. I don’t know if you know, but within Canva itself, you have the ability to create videos, right? If you search for YouTube videos, if you search for just videos, you’ll be presented with lots of options.

I’m going to go ahead and create a blank one. And I think the thing to know about Canva video is that I like them because there’s no watermark on it, regardless if you’re on the free or the paid plan, particularly the free plan, you know, with a lot of video makers and video software, that’s free, they’ll always put their watermark over it.

But with Canva, you can access it on the free plan without a watermark. Now you might be saying, well, that just looks like a blank Canva to me, but bear with me now, bear with me. Now, you’ve got lots of lots of options.

Once you’ve opened up the Canva to start designing, you can choose, you know, YouTube if you want to create your YouTube intro video, you could do that here. They’ve got a bunch of templates and you would click on a template, right?

And then you can use like their video assets. They’ve got on the left-hand side here, this videos tab, and that allows you to use their video elements, or you could go to uploads and you could upload your own videos to add. And I’m going to show you how to do that.

In the videos tab is where all of your existing videos will be. And this is one that I’ve prepared earlier. Otherwise, you would click upload media device, and then you’d be able to select that video file from your computer. And once you’ve done that, it will simply appear in the upload section in the video section.

I’ve got a bunch of videos that I’ve uploaded myself, and then to add them, you would simply click on them and then drag them to the timeline, right? And then this is a video. What if you wanted to crop it? Cropping is really easy.

I’m gonna take out the sounds for now so that hopefully it’s not playing through. Now, cropping is done by selecting the video that you’ve uploaded and then clicking on this crop option, right? No, what I’m talking about? I’m talking about, I’m talking about I’m trimming.

Trimming, the ability for you to actually change the length and cut sections of the video is done by you clicking on this scissor option here, right. If you click on that, you can see what happens at the top here. You’ve got a bit of a timeline, right?

And you can drag the section that you want to crop from. And just, you know, either, either section or you can drag it along to choose the section, and then you can just play it back to see that. And that’s how you would actually add a video and crop it.

Now, what if you, you know, wanted to crop out one section, but you still wanted more parts of the video? That’s totally cool too. In this bottom section here, which is kind of like the timeline, they’re evolving it, you would click add page.

You would add that video back into another section. Then you would just trim the next section that you wanted to add to the video. This first one would have the crop from the beginning. The second one would be the next part, and then you can change it around as well.

I really like this. If you, let’s say, I wanted to move a video that I’ve been cropping, I could literally drag it between the sections here. It’s really easy to crop it. It’s really easy to move it around. And they’re definitely doing a lot of work behind the scenes to get this more and more like, you know, the video editing software that we know and love.

I love that they’ve actually added all of these amazing functionality so Canva video, you can create videos for, you know, your YouTube intros, your YouTube outros. You can do the same treatment for Instagram stories, which I absolutely love as well.

Let’s go here and let’s look up Instagram stories. You can pick a, an Instagram story template, which is vertical, and then you could upload your own videos and you could literally just, you know, drop it onto the actual video, and then you’re creating stories really easily.

I really love that. This is probably not the best video of me, but that doesn’t matter. It it’s a video regardless. Creating videos is something that people also, probably not that aware that Canva do, because they think it’s just a thing that you can create images with, but they also allow you to do videos as well.

And, you know, when you upload your own videos, you can upload five gigs on a free, on the free plan. If you’re on the pro plan, you get to upload a hundred gigs. That’s huge.

That’s a massive amount of video files that you can actually upload. It really is becoming this incredibly robust option where you to create videos for you to create images and all sorts of content with. Now, let’s talk a little bit more since we’re on the actual video topic.

Now, let’s just say, you’ve got like this amazing video, and then you wanted to play some music. Canva allows you to play music. If you go down to this music tab here, you’ll see that they’ve got, guess what they’ve got.

They’ve got, they’ve got audio tracks and music that you can use. How does music work in Canva? There are two ways. If you are on the free plan, you can download a track and it’s $3 for a one-time license, right? You can access any of these tracks.

And these tracks are from epidemic sound for $3 each for each time you download it. Alternatively, if you go on the pro plan, then you get unlimited downloads. You can download as much music as you like from the, the music library, which is epidemic sound. And epidemic sound itself, it’s a paid subscription so you get it for free if you have camera pro, which is amazing.

We love things when they are included for free. That’s the other option that you have so you’ve got videos, and then you can add music to your videos as well. To add music, or you would do is if you’re using the music within Canva, you would choose your audio.

Let’s choose this one, and then you would drag it. And you can see here that the music that I just added is appearing in this bottom section here, and I can play it here, which I won’t, because it does weird stuff during the live stream. And that’s all, that’s all, that’s all you do.

You just drag it to use it. Now, let’s just say that you didn’t want to use any of the tracks here. That’s okay as well. You can upload your own audio. That’s a big game-changer as well.

Can upload audio in MP3 files in dot WAV files and dot MP4 files. And this is available, whether you’re on the free or paid plan. You would simply go to the uploads tab. You would upload your media, which would be those audio files.

And you would see them in this audio section here, and then you would literally just drag them on to the page that you actually want to add them too. And that’s how you would add audio to the actual video that you’re building. I absolutely love that.

I don’t know if people are aware of that, but it really allows you to create videos with audio or even like soundbites. You could take your podcast and upload it here and add it to a graphic.

It’s such a quick way of creating content, using things that you have, which is absolutely, you know, what we love and what we want this day and age.

That’s the next feature. Now let’s go to, back to my presentation. I want to talk a bit about the next feature, which people may or may not be aware of. And the feature that I’m going to talk about now is curved text. Apparently this is a feature that everyone wants to use, but no one knows it exists.

Within Canva, if you select some text and then you go to the effect section here, you can do guess what? You can curve it by clicking on this effect section here that says curve. And then you can see it’s taken my texts here and made it round.

And then I can drag the curveness to be a little bit curved or a lot curved, depending on what I want. You can curve your text with pretty much one click and a couple of drags using Canva.

And that’s really cool because, you know, you can have more ways of creating, installing your content, and it’s all with one click. And this is also available for free and paid people as well so paid people, paid users on Canva as well. This is a relatively new one that they dropped, but it’s here.

You would simply click on the text, go to the effects and choose this curve option. And that’s where it should appear. Super excited. Now, when it comes to Canva, one of the things that I love about it is the ability, the option that they have where they make everything really easy.

And one of the things that they do that I, I find incredible, I use all the time and it’s so time-saving for me is the background remover. I’m going to show you exactly what I mean.

I’m going to choose an image and I’m going to remove the background, right? Let’s see, Oh, I should have probably planned this. This is an image that I talk. And as you can see, you can see my wall.

There’s the blue wall, the frames, the Funko pop, and that’s fine, but I’d like to have it just me so that I can, you know, take away some of the distractions. All you would do to activate this is you would add your image, you would go to effects once again.

And then in this top of the effects here is background remover. And I’m going to cross my fingers and toes and pray this works. I didn’t practice this. I should’ve made an offering to the live stream Gods.

I forgot to practice before I did this one. But in theory, if I click on this background remover, it will remove the background automatically and work perfectly.

And it’s just doing its thing. Normally this works, but on a live stream, things can go, Oh, yay! It worked! Woo-hoo! There you see, it’s removed the background for me. Now there’s a little bit more to it because let’s just say, I can see like lots of straggly, little hairs here.

If you can, if you want to remove a little bit more and it hasn’t removed everything that you wanted it to, you can click on erase. And then this opens up this editor for want of a better word.

And then I can just go ahead and click on it and I can start removing my hair here, that, and just remove the sections that they’ve missed. Or if they’ve cut off too much, then I can click on restore and I can add it back. Right. I can add the hair back or whatever sections that I want back.

That’s all within a click, a couple of clicks. And like, if you’ve struggled to do it in Photoshop and you can do it with one click here, like this made my day when they finally rolled this out. That’s how you would remove the background for your images.

And I use this all the time. I use this pretty much with all of my YouTube thumbnails. I’m always taking selfies, who else was taking selfies anyway? But for my YouTube thumbnails, I’m always taking selfies and then removing the background in Canva.

Now let’s talk about, let’s go back to Canva here. One of the other features that I, that they rolled out very recently for Australia and New Zealand, but they’ve had it in the US and Canada, and they’re starting to roll it out more and more, and this is Canva print, but in particular, we’re going to look at mugs.

Why am I bringing up mugs? With Canva you have the ability to design and print and deliver certain things. They allow you to do that for t-shirts. They’ve got mugs, they’ve got print canvases. And I’ve ordered a couple so I’m excited to show you that when those arrive.

And I’m going to show you how it rocks with mugs. I’ve looked at mugs, they’ve got a bunch of mug templates. You can either start with a blank template, or you can use one of theirs. I’m going to click on one of their existing ones.

Once again, it opens up the Canva canvas, and then once you’re ready with all of the, you know, changes and you’re ready to go, you would click on print mugs, right? And then you have the option of having the design on both sides of the mug so you can see it there, or on one side.

And then you can go ahead and follow the prompts, and then you can print it and have it sent to your home. When I saw that, I was like, I’m going to print so many mugs.

I’ve already actually ordered some mugs for like Christmas for friends, but I, I think it’s such an awesome option for you to also print your own merch and give it away as gifts or give it to your audience, or just use it for yourself. You can do that with mugs.

You can do that with canvases. I’m going to do it with canvases because I was so excited. I’m going to type in canvas, let’s go, let’s go portrait canvas. Right? And then I’m going to go blank. I love that they give you the preview.

Once again, I’ve got this blank canvas, I’m going to upload an image that I commissioned that I actually ordered. Hopefully, it actually shows. This is an image of wonder woman that I had commissioned. And then, you know, I would size it to the actual canvas.

It’s a bit raunchy, but you know, so is wonder woman. Then you would click print canvases, and then you can see here, you’ve got different canvas sizes, right. And you would choose the size that you want. And how cool is that?

You can also have like amazing prints canvases that are framed sent to you. Now, obviously the larger it is, the more it will cost, but how cool is that the ability for you to like print all of this stuff? They’ve got so many different print options as well. Like they’ve got, let’s go back to me now.

Woah, my camera’s being a bit weird. What’s happened there? Okay. Was not expecting that, but let’s go back to not this horrible screen. They’ve got so many options that allow you to print. They’ve got business cards, they’ve got t-shirts, they’ve got a whole bunch of stuff, and I love that they allow you to design and print and send it to yourself all in one, you know, all in one space.

Absolutely love that with Canva. Don’t know what’s happening with my video feed, but we’re just going to keep rolling with it because this is kind of strange. That pretty much wraps up the teaching part that I had covered for today. Hopefully, you found that really useful.

We’ve covered heaps of stuff. We talked about talking presentations, we talked about Canva video, we talked about music within Canva and being able to upload audio.

We talked about curved text. We talked about background remove and we talked about Canva print. I seriously don’t know what happened to my video and why it’s been suddenly really weird. It’s never, ever done that before, but Hey, there’s always a first time for everything.

Strange why is it doing that? Nope. It’s still stretched. Don’t know why it suddenly decided to stretch itself. But I won’t put you through that. I’ll just answer the questions with Canva on the screen. Pete Johns is here and he says, Hey, good to see you, Pete.

Always nice to have you here. Now, Joe John. Oh, little bit inappropriate, but okay. Pete Johns is here. Pete John says, ‘Wait, Canva has a recording studio and I wasn’t told?’ I know, right? You have the ability to like record your videos using talking heads. That’s always cool.

I always love to see the features that they have. And Awesome Creators says, ‘Oh my God, I’m working on my content stuff and catching you live. You’re an inspiration, Sara. I love the work you do here on YouTube. Keep going.’ aw thanks. Thanks, girl. Thank you so much.

That’s such a nice comment to have. Don’t know why my feed is coming through really weird still, but it’s just one of those days. It’s one of those days. Pete says, ‘Canva and audio now, too. These are hidden gems.’ I love that they have epidemic sound like people don’t realise how awesome epidemic sound, you know, as a feature in Canva is, but I’m like, Ooh, that’s so cool. Okay.

Awesome Careers says, ‘offering the live stream gods.’ Offering to the live stream gods. Yes. Didn’t make enough of an offering. That’s why my picture is being a bit weird, but as I said, we’re just kind of roll with it.

Jade Starr’s here. Hey Jade, nice to have you here. Thanks for joining us. That essentially wraps up the live stream today. Hope that you found it really useful and I’m going to kind of investigate after the live stream, why I’m coming through a stretch because this is the first time it’s happened in like over a year and a half of live streaming, but Hey, we kind of just roll with it.

We kind of just roll with it. If you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. If you haven’t already, where I do lots more tutorials on social media, on video, on live stream to help you grow your business, using video with ease.

And make sure you grab a copy of my Social Media Checklist. I’ll show you how to get up and running on all of the major social media networks so you can start leveraging them to build your business using the power of social with ease. And I will end the live stream. Thank you guys for joining me tonight.