New Canva Docs will create beautiful, rich documents

Documents are fundamental to how we communicate, and yet the way we design them hasn’t evolved in years. With traditional document editors, adding rich graphical elements isn’t always a seamless experience – and because they’re designed with printers in mind, their formats are static.

But your documents can be beautiful as well as functional. To stand out and make an impression in a world that’s gone visual, you need to create documents that are visually stunning, engaging, and impactful.

Design visual docs

Today, we’re unveiling Canva Docs, a brand-new document creation tool that adds a whole raft of functionality to help bring documents to life for creators, teams, and readers. Officially launching to our global community later in the year, we’re thrilled to share the sneak peek presented on stage at today’s Canva Create global event.

Canva Docs will combine everything you know and love about Canva with new features designed to maximize productivity and collaboration. Built with the modern team in mind, we’ve designed Docs to seamlessly combine rich text, engaging media, and powerful data visualizations in any document you create.

Canva Docs also effortlessly connects with all of the other Canva products you’re used to. Not only can you instantly access our content library of more than 100 million design assets, but we’re also making it easier than ever to embed graphs, videos, and other rich visual elements into your work.

Whether you’re creating your own document, or viewing and collaborating with someone on your team, Canva Docs will elevate the way you and your team work and communicate.

Create and collaborate with ease

Canva empowers your team to deliver professional content at scale. From strategy docs to meeting minutes, financial reports, and business proposals – we combine all of the tools you need to supercharge the look and feel of your work.

When you open your first Canva Doc, you’ll find all the familiar text editing features and formatting options. You can get started quickly with templates where you can add all your text with intuitive formatting. With Canva’s drag-and-drop editor, you’ll also be able to swap out images for your own, or choose from our ever-growing content library to match the topic.

Then, set your permissions and share the doc with your teammates to bring all your ideas together.

Canva Docs are also packed with features to help you collaborate better. You can connect in real time and see where your teammates are with colorful cursors and selections; or leave comments, assign tasks and create interactive to-do lists and agendas to communicate asynchronously.

Connect your content with Canva Embeds

One of the most powerful features we’ll be launching as part of Canva Docs is the ability to embed designs you’ve created elsewhere in Canva. Imagine building a project plan that includes the Whiteboard your team brainstormed on, the presentation you used for the kickoff meeting, and the social assets or videos you plan to use – all in one place.

Embedding these elements doesn’t mean they’re merely linked. You can also open your other designs and get the full context without leaving the document. While you’re there, you can even tweak the wording, change an image or make any other edits required, all without leaving Canva Docs.

Turn your document into a beautiful presentation with just one click

Ever created a document and then realized you need to present the information in a team meeting instead? Copying and pasting all that information into a new presentation takes a lot of time, and then you need to carefully format slides to make them look professional.

With Canva’s new Docs to Decks feature, you’ll always be just a couple of clicks away from a polished presentation. With the press of a button in the new Canva Docs, magically transform your Canva document into a presentation deck. All the formatting and design layout is handled for you, although you can always still jump in and make edits or add more context if you need to. This feature brings together all the magic of Canva, empowering anyone to design a beautiful presentation with ease.

Engage your audience and achieve your goals

Canva Docs are dynamic and visually exciting. In today’s visual world, readers expect to be told a clear story in words, images, videos, and numbers that jump off the page.

Sharing is caring

We’ve designed Canva Docs for today’s world of work, which means you can share documents in a multitude of ways. This means shared online, as a Canva link, or even with your own branded URL. All Canva Docs are responsive, which means you can be confident they’ll look amazing across all devices and screen sizes.

With our built-in design insights, you’ll also be able to see exactly how your docs are being interacted with, so you’ll know how many people viewed a document and how that changes over time.

Telling powerful stories with data

The rich visual features in Canva Docs include the ability to create visually stunning charts and graphs – and with Flourish joining Canva earlier this year – you can create advanced, interactive charts and graphics that make data even easier to understand. The Flourish team are pioneers in data visualization, and we’re making it easy to bring those powerful and easy-to-use capabilities into Canva Docs.

Data has become central to storytelling, but it needs to be presented in a way that’s clear and compelling. With Canva charts and graphs, you can make your data beautiful and easy to digest in seconds. Start by directly inputting or pasting your data, uploading a CSV, or connecting to a Google Sheet, and instantly see your data spring to life in a beautiful visualization.

With the Flourish app in Canva, you’ll be able to accelerate your data visualization powers with interactive charts and graphics. For example, build an animated play-through bar and line races, drill-down sunbursts, and tree maps that make data fun and engaging for any audience. Inline controls allow viewers to explore your data or customize their view, with the ability to search, change displays, or play, pause, and rewind. Tooltips and popup panels allow viewers to explore additional information about your data at their own pace.

Sign up for beta access today

We’re incredibly excited to officially launch Canva Docs in a few months' time, and we want you to be one of the first people to give it a go! If you’d like to try it out later this year, join the waitlist by clicking this link and we’ll notify you when Canva Docs is ready for you to try.

We hope to see you reimagining your documents in the very near future!