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Your Canva designs on your screens

Already make your menus, offers, and signs in Canva? Bring them straight onto your screens instead of building them again. Each page of a Canva design becomes its own screen, and the screens stay linked to the design — change it in Canva, re-import it here, and the same screens update.

Import a design

  1. Open trivia settings and sign in.
  2. Under Your trivia, choose Import a Canva design.
  3. The first time, choose Connect Canva and approve access on Canva's own page. You come straight back with your designs listed.
  4. Pick a design — search if you have a lot of them — and choose Import.

Every page arrives as a screen in your list, in page order, named after the design: a five-page menu becomes Fall menu · 1/5 through Fall menu · 5/5. The design itself is listed under Linked Canva designs.

To make screens for one TV, start from Players instead: open the player and choose Import a Canva design under On this screen. Those screens start out on that player alone.

Pages come in as pictures, and pictures on your screens come with a subscription. Import up to 50 pages at a time.

What a page looks like on screen

Each page fills the screen as a picture of itself, in the screen shape closest to the page — so a Canva presentation (16:9) fills a landscape TV edge to edge, and a portrait story fills a TV hung on its side. A page between shapes, like a printed poster, is shown whole with black either side rather than cropped.

An imported screen is an ordinary screen of yours from then on. Aim it at particular TVs, give it a schedule, change its place in a player's lineup, or open it in the screen designer and put something on top — a price sticker, a "sold out" banner. None of that is undone by the next re-import.

Update a design

  1. Choose Edit in Canva beside the design under Linked Canva designs to open it in Canva.
  2. Make your changes there.
  3. Back here, choose Re-import.

The same screens get the new version of their page. Each one keeps its TVs, its schedule, its place in each lineup, and anything you added on top in the screen designer. A page you added in Canva becomes a new screen, on the same TVs and schedule as the page before it, and a page you deleted in Canva takes its screen with it.

Unlink a screen, or a whole design

Some screens should stay exactly as they are — last year's holiday hours, an offer you want to keep running unchanged. Choose Unlink beside that screen in your list, or above the canvas in the screen designer, and re-imports pass it by. Choose Unlink beside a design under Linked Canva designs to let go of all of its screens at once.

Unlinked screens keep showing what they show now. Replacing or deleting the Canva picture in the screen designer unlinks a screen too, so a re-import never paints over something you chose instead.

Your Canva account

The import window shows which Canva account is connected. SoftWork Beats only reads your designs, and only to import the ones you pick — it never changes or creates anything in Canva.

Choose Disconnect in the import window to remove the connection. Your imported screens stay as they are, and connecting again is all it takes to re-import them. You can also remove SoftWork Beats from your Canva account's settings at any time.

Tips for designs that read well on a TV

  • Start from a Presentation (16:9) design for a TV on the wall, or a 1080 × 1920 portrait design for one hung on its side.
  • Make the words bigger than feels natural. A TV across a room is a long way from your eyes.
  • Animations and videos in a design come in as a still picture of the page. For a video screen, use the screen designer's Video instead.
  • A design with premium content imports only if your Canva plan includes it.