Why I'm excited about Canva Code and Canva Sheets?

Canva is a tool I've been using more and more over the years. It's a tool I have so much fun with that I even watch their annoucement keynotes to be sure to have all the details about all the new features and tool that come out.

Yesterday Canva had their annual conference where they announced a ton of new things. Here are two that I'm really excited about:

Canva Code

Canva Code is like Lovable or Replit, but within Canva. Which means, if you already pay for Canva Pro, which I do, you have access to a tool that writes code for you and makes it possible to publish mini apps.

In just maybe two hours I made a tiny version of the Workshop Planner idea that I've already built in a few no-code or ai coding tools.

The one thing that is a bit a pain in the ass at the moment with it is that it can only the browser local storage to store data. Which means that if you make a new version of the app, you loose your data. But it's plenty of fun to prototype apps in a way where people can really test them out proprely.

I think I'll have a lot of fun creating tiny apps for my personal use with this as it's all already included in my subscription.

Canva Sheets

Canva Sheets is a sort of Google Spreadsheet meets Airtable. But the two elements that I feel pretty excited about are:

• The possibility to generate designs directly from that spreadsheet

• The possibility to use AI to generate text for specific columns based on a custom prompt

Where I see this of value is for example for the newsletter I sometimes help to create for a local NGO that is based on interview notes in bullet points that I then write up using ChatGPT as I have to write it in German, and I'm pretty slow in writing in that language. Here I could have a column with the notes, and a column that automatically outputs the text of the newsletter all with one click. And then it's already in Canva.

My bonus: multiple formats in one doc

If I had to add one bonus element that I really appreciate from this update is the possibility to have in one document multiple formats. This means you can have a whiteboard followed by a video, followed by a social media image, all in the same doc. This makes sharing elements for a communication campaign about a project so much easier.