Since August 2015, a new product has appeared in the Microsoft Office 365 family of office products - Sway.

Microsoft Office already has a great product for preparing presentations - PowerPoint. Why do we need another one?

The difference is in the presentation of the material.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is a powerful, proven tool for presenting clearly defined material in the form of a slide show. Typically, various product teams like to use PowerPoint presentations for various seminars, webinars, and as a reference with a table of characteristics.

And what often happens is that they try to cram everything they can onto the slides. In case they don’t watch the presentation with the speaker live, they’ll at least watch it later.

And this leads to overload of slides, inability to watch and listen to the speaker.

And this in no way means that the PowerPoint tool itself is inferior.

Sway

Sway is a new approach to the implementation of material delivery. It takes into account that the presentation audience can be mobile, watch the presentation from devices of different form factors, and use information from various online resources in real time.

The Sway presentation is based on storytelling - presenting material through telling a story.

Storytelling– a marketing technique that uses media potential to convey information and convey meaning through storytelling.

The purpose of storytelling– providing effective motivation for the action required from the subject.

The Storytelling Challenge– create a clear relationship between the past, present and future, pushing to the correct conclusion about the present.

Storytelling Mission- capture attention from the first second and keep it throughout the entire story, causing the reader or viewer to sympathize with the main character of the story and thus convey the main idea to him.

See if you can tell it in the form PowerPoint slides history?

Many will say yes. Can your story live without a speaker? It's difficult to answer...

What are these stories?

Sway allows you to create interactive portfolios, educational reports, blog posts, newsletters, vacation stories, educational materials for employees.

Basically, this is your script. This is where you should start your work.

Having thought through the script, you write it in the form of text on cards. Sway does not distract you with the location and formatting of text, pictures, and videos. You set the meaning and emphasis. Sway does the rest: optimization for different devices, design, and providing access to history.

Creating a Sway Presentation

Now I will show you step by step how to work in Sway.

Launch the browser and go to sway.com

Log in using your Microsoft Account or Office 365.

You can select a specific template and change it at your discretion

Or click the Start with document button and upload the file. Sway understands the structure of many file types and can transform a document into a Sway story.

As an example, I use PowerPoint presentation and upload it to Sway.

The story is divided into cards, you can change the design and view it

For comparison, what it looked like in PowerPoint

To be honest, it doesn't look quite right. Needs some work on the design. But all key information is correctly imported into the History feed.

Let's try to create a story from scratch. To do this, on the initial screen, click the Create button.

The entire Sway story consists of text and multimedia cards. Cards can be grouped into sections.

I will call the story “Homemade Bread”. The title card has the ability to set a background. Sway delves into the words that are located on the card and offers to choose a picture that matches the meaning of the text. The first option we see are pictures about homemade bread:

I’m adding a few more cards with text and videos.

In cards different types there are additional options.

For example, in a picture card there are Focus Points - these are important semantic points that should be visible in the image even when it is scaled, for example, on a mobile phone.

Cards have the ability to set text highlighting, emphasis, lists, and links. And also set the semantic highlighting of the card.

Sway takes this information into account when creating the design.

In the Designer I select a design style

Now you can click Play and look at the result:

Example of a completed story

Our company Technopolis became a finalist in 2015 international competition Microsoft partner solutions.

One of the requirements for the competition application was the presence of a presentation. I decided to make it in Microsoft Sway, which was still in Preview status at that time.

And here is the finished result, now I would not use such turns of English speech 😉

In the new introductory review we will talk about such an interesting service for creating presentations - Sway, which was developed by Microsoft. Personally, I have the concept “ interactive presentation” is instantly associated with the famous Power Point. At the start of technology development, this was the only program where any student/manager could create a colorful presentation with gradient headings and ridiculous animation. A little later, other technology companies began to provide similar opportunities, allowing demo materials to be posted online. Microsoft, in this sense, did not waste time and introduced a new concept for publishing presentations on the Internet.

This is how Sway was born. The service is quite young, it was presented to the public in 2014 and it has not yet gained significant popularity, especially in Russia. But it’s definitely worth taking a closer look at the development.

What is he like? Sway is a platform, an editor that allows you to combine various content (text, photos, drawings, maps, videos) into a single form and publish it on the Internet. The user can create a visual style and placement of elements at his own discretion, but there are still certain laws that should be followed. The fact is that any Sway presentation has adaptive layout and therefore will be perfectly displayed both on the desktop and on the smartphone screen. This is the main advantage of Microsoft development.

Sway is not a Power Point copy for the Internet. This is an independent product with a very simple, well-thought-out interface, support for drag’n’drop, touch input and other useful modern goodies. Even a child can handle it. You can create materials for demonstrations in the application for Apple devices, in the Windows 10 app and on Sway.com.

There are no slides or cells, the content “flows” seamlessly, simulating the illusion of a single canvas. You can create material on the go if you have an application installed on your tablet or phone (not available for Android yet, but it’s a matter of time).

Everything created in Sway, of course, cannot be called in one word - presentation. Rather, these are interactive materials - analogues of magazine pages with cool typography and photographic materials. All done with my own hands you can save locally, publish, share via social networks, and even embed presentations on your website.

An example of such integration:

Sway is a great product for those who want to share interesting information in an interactive manner. Considering that most similar services require a subscription fee, new development Microsoft needs to pay special attention.

Microsoft is one of the largest transnational companies specializing in manufacturing software For various kinds electronics - does not stand still. And a new solution that simplifies the life of users in the field of creating presentations is the Sway application. What kind of program is this and what is it for, now let’s try to figure it out.

A completely new solution

Sway is a completely new solution that is designed to facilitate and speed up the process of creating visual representations - presentations. Before the release of the new software, there was only one multifunctional and work-optimized product on the market - PowerPoint. Main feature The new application has become universal.

But the Sway application is designed for creating not only presentations, but also websites. Before this, Microsoft made attempts to release a worthwhile product for creating Internet portals - FrontPage. But for unknown reasons, it did not gain widespread popularity among PC users.

Accessibility is a key feature of Sway. “What kind of program is this that requires you to download an installation package to work with?” - the company’s programmers seem to be asking about their creation, because to work with it you only need to have access to the Internet. You can connect to the web service from any device, but those who prefer the “classic” can install the application on their computer.

Main advantages

There are many applications available in the digital market that can be used to create presentations. But in this regard, Microsoft made a real breakthrough and provided Sway with a huge head start. What is this program? Why can't other applications compete with it? The point is the advantages of the product:

There were no applications on the market that could predict user actions, which was implemented in Sway. What kind of program is this that independently selects templates and adjusts the text layout based on a given algorithm? Now you know the answer.

How to start using it?

Since the application was developed and released after the release of Windows 10, it is not included in the standard suite of office applications. To start using the utility, just update your Office365 software package. The program can also be downloaded from the store, but to do this you must be registered in the system.

The second way to start creating presentations is to visit the interactive service website directly. To get started, you will need a Microsoft account and register on Sway.com. After a few simple manipulations, the Sway service will become available to you. What is this program? Is it necessary? You won't ask such questions anymore.

As easy as shelling pears

To create your own projects, you only need an Internet connection. You can extract and then add interactive data - images, videos, sounds - from the vastness of the world wide web. To do this, you only need to provide links to files.

A large assortment of templates and various special effects will simplify the work on your presentation, and as soon as the application understands your algorithm, you can speed up the process significantly, only occasionally adjusting the design. You can return to editing a slide at any time by simply flipping through the project, like a book.

Automate the process of creating presentations with Sway. What is this Windows program 10? The one that does all the work for you!

The most famous assistant for creating presentations will now have to make room, as it has a worthy competitor. The project has a memorable name Sway and, just like Power Point, can be used to create various presentations, reports, developing individual slides and performing other similar actions. However, as befits a younger service, Sway has a number of advantages that over time will allow it to seriously compete with the usual Power Point.

So, what's good about the new service?

Firstly, it is cross-platform, that is, it exists in several versions at once: as an online service, a desktop application for Windows 10, and an add-on for iPad or iPhone. All variations of the service are free for Microsoft account holders, which is quite logical, since the project itself is the brainchild of this company.

Secondly, it has a very clear and at the same time very functional interface. Beginners and not very experienced users often have problems understanding the functionality of Power Point, since this service is designed for professionals and those who have already developed presentations using other programs. There will be no such problems with Sway - the service was originally developed for users with different levels experience. Everything is very simple and easy to understand. The interface is Russified.

Reminder. The presence of beautiful graphic elements on the site increases the loyalty of visitors to your site. Visitors see that content is created for people, and therefore their trust in this resource increases. The availability of high-quality food also increases the loyalty of visitors. feedback. There are many different sites and services for setting up feedback with visitors, but I would recommend the quickchat service as the simplest and most reliable.

Thirdly, Sway interacts closely with other services. The list contains well-known cloud services, popular photo, video and audio hosting sites - Flickr, You Tube, Vimeo, Picasa, SoundCloud and others, as well as most social resources, including Twitter. From there you can easily upload images and other information, creating slides based on it or adding various data in the form of tables, texts, charts and other visual objects.

To understand how the future Power Point competitor works, let’s consider the approximate sequence of creating presentations in the web version of Sway:

• First of all, register or activate your own Microsoft account. After all the data has been specified, the service will offer you to familiarize yourself with examples of possible presentations and other necessary functions.
• To start new project Just select the option of the same name on the left side of the screen. If you already have ready-made slides or presentations, you can download them directly from your computer or from Power Point using the “Import” function. By the way, the service works great with Word and PDF formats. The window for working on a new presentation consists of two parts: on the left side is a panel for searching and adding information, on the right is an editing area. Sway has a very extensive library of templates, which allows you to create presentations in accelerated mode. Other features are also aimed at making work as comfortable as possible. For example, if something went wrong, you can use the “History” option to go back a few steps and start development from a certain point, and to view already made slides, just minimize the editing area and the service will demonstrate the results of the work in preview mode.
• When everything is ready, the results can be saved to disk, to the cloud, or to Docs.com storage. You can also set the presentation to be published in social network or using HTML code to add it to one of the pages of your own website, that is, almost all possible options are provided.

So what can we say about Sway? This service, according to company representatives, is designed for all categories of users and will be useful to anyone who from time to time faces the need to visually present reports, projects and other similar information. It is really simpler, more accessible and more modern than Power Point. Will it become a potential competitor? Time will show.

If you master this sevris well, then with its help you will be able interesting presentations.

Video.
For fans of old-school methods, I suggest watching a video that describes in detail how to create interesting presentations using Power Point.

Microsoft Sway is an application developed and released by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Office suite. Announced at the end of 2014 and released on August 5, 2015. On at the moment you can download Microsoft Sway office for Windows 10, iOS or use the Web version for other platforms; release on Android is still being considered.

This application was created to quickly create effective presentations; it cannot be compared with Power Point, which has wider and more varied functionality. Sway in this regard is much easier to use and allows you to create a presentation in a few clicks, without much difficulty. Sway requires use of account Microsoft for further synchronization of your projects with all devices on which Sway will be launched.

Sway: what is this Windows 10 program

Let's look at what Sway is in Windows 10, the functionality of this application, so that its further use will not be difficult, although this is almost impossible, the interface and use of Sway is very intuitive and understandable.

On the initial screen, everything is quite simple: creating a presentation “from scratch” or based on a document and also starting materials in the form of Templates and other presentations created in Sway.

18 different templates, such as:

• Resume
• Portfolio
• Report
• Blog, etc.

Also, as an example, presentations are presented on English. These projects allow you to fully evaluate the capabilities and functionality of Sway.

Now let's move on to the main functionality - what can be created using the Sway application.

Let's try to create a new project based on existing information. For example, I’ll take an article by mistake Windows updates 10. On home page Click Start with document and wait while the application completes the formatting.

After a few seconds of waiting, Sway will provide us with our initial file in the form of a presentation. We can see the project in two tabs:

History is the main content of the content, which is divided into cards with their own functional purpose: Text, photos, videos, sounds, etc.

At the end of each card there is a + symbol, which allows you to add new card. Each card is divided by content format:
Text – create a title and a card with text.

Multimedia - image, video, music or sound, embedding content from other sites (more), and using other Office documents in the project.

Grouping – allows you to group content in one card using various styles: Automatic formatting, grid, comparison, side by side and slide show.

To select content for your presentation, use the Insert button, which will suggest relevant content based on your text. The following services are used to search for content: OneDrive, OneNote, Flickr, Bing Search, Pickit, YouTube, or content from your device.

Designer is a workspace that displays the “final” version of the document. The main work in this tab is aimed at presenting and displaying the content in its final form.

Using the Styles menu you can transform your project an almost infinite number of times.

Change the style of arrangement and scrolling - vertically, horizontally or in the form of slides.
Choose the style of your document from more than 100 templates or create your own unique one.

Choose a color based on your preferences or based on the images used, decide on the font, animation style and text size and your unique style is ready!

If you have enough time to choose a template or set color preferences, click “Change Design!” and the application itself will help with choosing and formatting the project.

Editing

Let's look at the possibilities of editing and sharing documents in Sway. Since the application is created primarily as a Web service, all files will be stored on the Internet. You can export the document to docx or pdf format, but in this case, some of the functionality and effects will be lost.

All presentations you create are linked to your account. Microsoft records and are displayed on the start page. You can edit them, duplicate them, create new templates, or simply share them.

Microsoft has done a great job great job with this application and is currently one of the best free programs to create presentations with such rich functionality and capabilities. Therefore, we advise you to download the Sway application for presentations, which will help you create better works.

Have a great day!