New life for presentations. Sway overview. PowerPoint Slide Set or Story Sway? sway does not present any
Features
- Want to spice up your story in Sway? Add text and images stored in OneDrive and on your device, or videos, including from the Vine site, as well as maps, tweets, interactive charts, graphs, and GIFs.
- Sway helps you find relevant images, videos, tweets, and other content that you can drag and drop directly into your work without having to open numerous apps and web pages.
- No need to worry about formatting: Sway's built-in layout engine does it all for you. If you don't like the design suggested, just click "Change Design!" to see other options or create your own.
- Let Sway inspire your family, friends, classmates and colleagues. Sharing content is easy. Friends will be able to view your creation on the Internet without registering anywhere and without downloading additional programs. You can also share edit rights in just a couple of steps. And if you need more control - privacy settings are at your service.
- Sign in with your Microsoft account or work or school account. This way you can view and edit your Sways on any device and they will be synced to the cloud.
The software giant considers its new free project Sway as part of the Microsoft Office package to be a promising brainchild and invests a lot of effort into its development.
What is Office Sway?
Sway, like Microsoft PowerPoint, is a presentation tool, but the former has a lot of differences with the latter, and the most important of them is the format of the output content. Whereas PowerPoint presentation files are regular documents to be filled with different content and saved in the .pptx format, Sways are the same presentations that are prepared from the same ingredients, only the output is different. Interactive Sways are web pages that can be accessed through a browser or client application.
Sway allows ordinary users without special training to create stylish online presentations from text, graphics, photo, video, audio content, adapted to the screens of various computer and mobile devices. Sway presentations have a modern, touch-optimized block layout design.
As part of the Microsoft Office suite, Sway is available as part of the Office Online web service applications on Sway.Com. Sway, which syncs with the web service, is available for free download from the Windows 10 store. As a mobile client, Office Sway is currently available for iPhone and iPad from the iTunes store.
To access Sway, you'll need the same account as other Office Online web apps and OneDrive cloud storage, either a regular Microsoft account or an Office 365 Web Project work account.
Sway presentation format
In fact, each Sway is a separate mini-site hosted on a Microsoft server. Each such presentation has its own web address, which consists of the Sway.Com domain and a unique identifier code for the presentation itself, similar to links to downloading files in cloud storages.
Moreover, the Sway presentation can be embedded into the user's existing web resource - a website, blog, forum, or any other web project that provides for the insertion of HTML codes.
A privileged position among the web resources, which provides for the automatic publication of an online presentation in one click, is occupied by the Docs.Com web service. This is an open resource from Microsoft, where users from all over the world can upload their materials - Sway and PowerPoint presentations, Word and PDF documents.
Search engines can index Sway presentations posted on Docs.Com, and therefore, like any other web page, they will be found in search results.
Office Sway web app and client for Windows 10
Instead, the app has the advantage of displaying data when there is no internet. However, local storage of presentations is possible provided that they have been synchronized with the Sway.Com web service, i.e. opened in the application on a specific device. Since the synchronization of the presentation with the web service is carried out at the moment it is opened in the application. Otherwise, in the absence of the Internet, the client application will be powerless.
Sway Source Materials
Presentation source materials can be downloaded directly from the device, including photos or videos just captured by the camera, or from web services supported by Sway. By clicking the "Insert" menu section, among the options for embedding presentation materials, you will see popular social networks. networks, note-taking web services, YouTube video hosting, cloud storage, and many other web resources organized in the Sway database. Sway Database - The "Featured" section that appears as the first option when you click the embed option allows you to search for photos, videos, and tweets by keywords.
Create Sways
Creating Sway presentations is similar to working with some sort of auto collage maker, where you can add source images, choose a layout from a few options, and then click a button like Make Collage. There are design templates, there are beautiful effects, there is a ready-made presentation format at the output. What is left for the user is, like filling a blender with ingredients, to add the source materials of the online presentation and place their blocks in the desired order. And that's it - the presentation is ready. Slowly flipping through its pages with your finger on a touch device, clicking on the navigation buttons in the lower right corner of the screen, pressing the navigation keys “Left Arrow” and “Right Arrow”, you can view the presentation and, if necessary, return to correction, adding or deleting blocks with materials.
Blocks with presentation materials can be freely dragged and swapped. A new box containing text, images, videos, charts, tweets, or embeds can be added anywhere in a presentation by positioning it between two existing boxes.
Microsoft has introduced a new concept, hitherto not present among the toolkit of Office products - cards. Cards are the same blocks with a selection of options for the introduction and design of materials. A card for designing a slide title, inserting text, adding an image, activating the device's camera to take a picture can be selected from among the proposed options for a new block. To insert objects such as videos, tweets, embeds, charts, image collages, cards are available in the menu section at the top with the appropriate name "Cards".
Sway does not support inserting Microsoft Office documents as a separate slide, however, Word, Excel, PowerPoint files are embedded in a Sway presentation using HTML code, which can be obtained from the File menu in the sharing options of their Office Online web applications.
Among the options for inserting images, there is a tool for custom setting focus points with a visual demonstration of how the finished slide will look on the screens of various devices, including mobile ones.
For the text of the presentation in the menu section "Designer" you can select the font, color, background from a small list ready-made templates. Any text design template can be changed using the settings.
In the Navigation section, there are currently three options for scrolling through presentation slides.
You can create new ones based on existing presentations. For these purposes, Sway provides a duplication function.
Sway allows you to change the design of your presentation with just a click of the "Change Design" button at the top.
True, you will have to click on this button more than once until a suitable design is randomly applied to the presentation.
Our article is devoted to the review of the new program from Microsoft. You will learn what Sway is and how it will change the world of online presentations.
Microsoft Office has pleased its users with a new product - the Sway program. The authors of the project are confident that their brainchild has a lot of advantages and a promising future. The main advantage of the novelty is the format of the finished presentation. Working, for example, with PowerPoint, the user receives ordinary documents that are filled with a variety of content, and then saved in the .pptx format. Our application works similarly, but the final product is slightly different.
Sway is a program for creating presentations of a new type, with the ability to synchronize across devices and in the cloud.
The project includes the best of Microsoft's other programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
The main advantages of Sway:
- The program was developed with an emphasis on mobility and clouds, that is, it can be used on all devices, including: smartphones and tablets.
- When creating a presentation, there is no need to go to the appropriate applications when performing any action with the selected element. Graphics, text, photos, videos are now available for selection and processing within the Sway.
- Ready layouts can be sent to other users. They are available even to those users who do not have Microsoft programs installed.
- Created Sway presentations can be posted online, popular social networks, sent by e-mail.
- Works in Sway are interactive "sites" that are accessed directly through a browser or through a special application.
- Automation is one of the key strengths of Sway. Thanks to automation, the process of creating online presentations is accelerated, taking into account the control of the user. Sway tries to guess his intentions and offers the best options for further action. It is enough to note the importance of a file, and the program itself will place it, focusing on it.
To access Sway, you can use the same account that you use for other Office Online web apps. In addition, you will need access to a regular Microsoft account (OneDrive cloud storage) or access to an Office 365 web project account.
Each presentation has its own page loaded on the Microsoft server. Such a presentation is assigned its own web address and a unique code that can be embedded in the user's already existing web resource: a blog, website, or some other web project. When the work is ready, it is assigned its own link, which is easy to send to friends.
The materials that you need to create a Sway presentation can be taken both from your own device and from web services that support Sway: popular social networks, note-taking web services, cloud storage, YouTube video hosting, etc.
The process of making Sway presentations is not difficult. The program has design templates, interesting effects. You just need to add the necessary material files for an online presentation and arrange their blocks in the required order. You can view the finished job on the touch screen using the Left Arrow or Right Arrow key. If desired, return to the correction, add, remove or swap blocks with files.
All presentations look very impressive and are available for viewing from any operating system: Windows, Linux, iOS, Android and the like. In Windows 10, the program is preinstalled. I hope you understand what this Sway program is and what its main advantages are.
Using PowerPoint has long been considered the unspoken standard for creating presentations. At any conference, meeting or lecture, you can see presentations accompanied by familiar slides from this program. However, now we have a new powerful presentation tool at our disposal, which has a number of significant advantages over PowerPoint. Here is just a short list of them.
To get started with Sway on the web, you need to have a Microsoft account. After logging in, you will see an offer to view several completed works in order to familiarize yourself with the main features of the editor. You can start a new project from scratch, or by uploading files from Word or PowerPoint to it.
Clicking on the "Create" button will allow you to start working on new presentation, for which you first need to come up with a name. After that, you can add the desired content, for which the left panel is intended to be selected. The main part of the editor window is occupied by the editing area, where texts, headings, pictures, videos, charts and other content you need are located. At any time, the editing area can be minimized and view the result of your work as the audience will see it.
To quickly change the look of your presentation, Sway has many built-in templates, and each of them can be customized.
The finished work can be published on popular social networks, embedded using special HTML code in a web page, or saved to your online document repository at Docs.com. By the way, if you haven't heard, this is another new service from Microsoft for publishing and storing documents.
According to Microsoft, the Sway project was not created to compete with PowerPoint, but in addition to it. It is designed to meet the needs of those users who work on the Web, widely use web content and present their projects also on the Internet. However, something seems to me that the product turned out to be so interesting that it will be quite capable of pressing the old PowerPoint. And what do you think?
In this article, I will tell what is Sway, I will describe the capabilities of this application and its functionality, and also demonstrate how to work with Sway.
It would seem that today there are a sufficient number of programs for creating presentations on the market. Power Point and Impress, ProShow Producer and Kingston Presentation, Prezi and others have already gained positions in the market, and it will be hard to squeeze them out. But there is an application that can overtake Power Point and become the leader in the list of presentation programs - this is Sway.
What is Sway
Sway is free program for creating presentations, positioned as a companion to the popular Power Point. The program is quite new (released in August 2015), the creator and developer of the product is Microsoft. This Sway program is known to work with the Microsoft accounts of its users, allowing you to use text and media in creating web presentations. The created content can also be saved locally on your device, the functionality of the program allows you to use resources such as Facebook, Youtube, OneDrive, OneNote, Bing and others.
You can use the Sway software using any browser, as well as from an iOS application (I haven’t found analogues for Android yet, although an Android version is also planned).
How to work with Sway
It is clear that this application was developed for those who do not need the extra functionality of Power Point in creating presentations. Sway's simple and accessible interface allows you to easily and quickly create web presentations without special training, and then post them on the network in the form of Internet pages on a Microsoft server. These pages are accessed using a browser or client application.
How it looks like creating a presentation using Sway can be seen in the video:
The developer also introduced a new tool in the form of so-called "cards" - blocks with a set of options for designing materials. You can always choose the most convenient card among the suggested options when creating a new block. In the Sway card options, there is a tool for setting focus points, allowing you to see how the slide will look on different devices.
Sway has the ability to duplicate presentations, allowing you to use ready-made sets and templates, and also allows you to change the overall presentation design using the Change Design button.
What distinguishes Sway from similar programs
The Sway presentation itself can be embedded in a user's private resource (website, forum, blog, etc.), but only in one that allows the insertion of html codes.
Conclusion
I realized that Sway is a simple, convenient and practical product for creating presentations. The free nature of the application, intuitive interface, wide functionality - all this constantly increases its popularity among millions of users around the world. If you often have to give presentations, give lectures and seminars, then maybe you should pay attention to Sway, this program will definitely not deceive your expectations.
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