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Is Canva planning to challenge Google and Microsoft? Find out in a second. But first
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if you get a chance, I would love it if you could subscribe to my YouTube channel, where each week I'll be uploading new videos on a variety of different topics
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Okay, so the big news in technology today was the first ever Canva Create event
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The Australian-based design company announced a number of new features coming to their platform
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the biggest being Canva Visual WorkSuite. This announcement expands Canva services into a suite of different products to create all types of content. This includes Canva Docs
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which is a mix between your typical Canva design and a word processing program
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Canva Websites, a drag-and-drop website design editor with hundreds of templates. Canva Whiteboards, which are collaborative designs with unlimited real estate space
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As well as Data Visualizations 2.0, which will allow users to transform a spreadsheet
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into interactive displays and visualizations. These tools will join products such as Canva
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Presentations, Social Media, Video, and Print. The end result of this is what appears to be
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a powerful productivity suite of tools focused around visuals and design. Obviously, the new
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WorkSuite has drawn comparisons to other productivity suites such as Microsoft, 365, and Google Workspace. This has led some to speculate that Canva's latest release is an
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attempt to take on both Google and Microsoft. So should we expect an all-out Canva vs. Google
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vs. Microsoft war? Not according to Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht
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In an interview with TechCrunch, he said, We're not trying to compete head-to-head with Google Docs
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Our products are inherently visual, so we take a visual lens on
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What does a visual document look like? How do you turn that boring document that's all text-based
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into something engaging? Obrecht sees the products in Canva Visual WorkSuite as a way to enhance the
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content created in Google and Microsoft. And you definitely can use Canva's tools to improve the
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look of the content that you create in, say, PowerPoint. But using multiple platforms to
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create content can get tiring for some users. So down the line, as Canva continues to develop
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their offerings, it does make you wonder if users will elect to use Canva over Google and Microsoft
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rather than in tandem. For the immediate future, I can see these offerings being a direct challenger
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to a company like Adobe, specifically the Adobe Creative Cloud Express, which is a similar product
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to Canva. It also makes you wonder whether some of the other products in the Visual WorkSuite
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can challenge similar services, for example, Canva websites and Squarespace. Or Canva whiteboards and Miro. But for now, we'll just have to wait to see how this all plays out
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If you want to catch the broadcast of Canva Create, you can find it on Canva's YouTube channel
