While I love creating Canva videos about simple things you can create, many of you are ready for something a bit more advanced. So in this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to bulk create design variants from data.
A great application of this technique would be creating business cards for your team or place cards for your next event. I’m even going to show you how to merge your images into frames to save time.
If you’ve never used Canva, this might be a bit much for you, but for my Canva Pro fam, you’re going to love this new trick.
Quick notes before we get started. Number one is I’m going to link to this article: https://www.canva.com/help/bulk-create/.
The other thing is this feature is available to Canva Pro users, Canva for Teams, Canva for Education, and Canva for Non-profit users.
So what I’m going to do in this tutorial is going to take you back and forth between this help article and the actual Canva design editor so you can see how this works. When I did walk through it, I did notice that you want to find apps within the Canva design editor to find the bulk create button.
So if you don’t see it on the left-hand side, that is how you would access it. So we are going to use this business card as an example for something we could bulk create.
We’re going to scroll to the bottom and we’re going to click on apps, and from there under more from Canva, you’re going to see the bulk create option.
So from there, we can add our data. It says upload data as a CSV file or enter a table of data manually to quickly create hundreds of pages. So as you can see at the bottom, this design is considered page one. The back of the card is considered page two. So for this example, we’re just going to play around with the front of the business cards. So we’ll do that, and again, we can upload a CSV file from our computer, or we can enter the data manually.
If you’re entering data directly, then you can do it from the bulk create tab. Make sure that you delete the sample data and enter or paste the data into the tables. If you need to add more columns or rows, just click on the table cell, then click accept to proceed.
So when we go back we’re going to say enter data manually, and you are going to see here you have name, email, and we can add text or we can add an image.
So when we go back to the design, we have a few areas here. We have name, we’ll say title, phone number, email, website, and location. And so these are the things that we would like to feature in those columns within Canva. That way, Canva knows exactly where to put that data in the design. So now that we have taken a closer look at the template, we need to set up the table and then start entering that data manually.
So at the top, I would click at the top and label all of these, so you don’t have to remember what goes in each column, and then you can start to fill out the information to be imported into Canva underneath it. If you find that you have created too many columns, you can simply right-click on the column and delete the column.
So what I did here is I added in first name, title, phone, email, website, location, and the last one is I want to add an image. From there, I’m going to put in my first row of information. Now that I have established the columns for the data, when you get to the image column, you can select an uploaded image from your Canva library.
This again is where these Canva folders come in. Since I easily have a Canva T-shirt image folder, I can just scan here and select the image that I would like to appear on my business card. Now if there were other members of my team, I could import their information here manually, and when I am done I click on done.
Now that you have created your columns and added in your data, we need to connect your data to the elements in your design template. So to do that, we’re going to right-click on the element and then select the data field that we would like to be dropped into that element.
So we’re going to right-click here, connect that data to first name, and we can expand it here, we want to connect that to title, this will be connected to phone, and so this is simply telling Canva put this information in this space. After you do this once for your design, any data that you add will be dropped into the correct location.
For image, you would do the same thing, connect that data to image. Alrighty, so now that we have everything in, we’re going to click continue, and it says apply the data create Pages based on the data that you entered. You can either select all or specifically select the one that you are trying to create. So if you created the format for your design first and you came back later with the rest of your data, then you wouldn’t have to export the same designs all over again.
If you hired a new team member, you could just select that person’s data set instead of your entire collection.
So we’re going to click on generate page, let Canva think about it, and hopefully what will happen is it will drop everything in. And so as you can see, I think everything looks great, the only thing I would say here is I’m not entirely sold on the quality of that image, it needed to properly load.
So just in case if you want to change the image after the fact you can always go in and replace the image, here I see that this was a bit long for that option, so if I wanted to change that I could adjust that text and maybe move that line over just for my design or I could even make the font smaller.
If you are a solopreneur working from home you may not utilize this feature that often, but if you are a part of a non-profit or you’re running a small business I could totally see you creating designs based on data to save yourself time.
Also, as you continue to grow and expand it’ll make it a lot easier for you to make new designs based on data sets versus having to make a new design from scratch.
That concludes the Canva tutorial on how to bulk create your Canva designs.
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