Introduction To Microsoft Sway In Office 365

Today I am going to talk about Microsoft Sway in Office 365. Sway is a presentation program and it's been part of Microsoft since August 2015. Sway allows users who have a Microsoft account to combine text and media to create a presentable web site. It is very easy to do this. We can copy or open the information from a local system and use it for social sites and others. Sway is online and browser based whereas PowerPoint is primarily for desktop with Office 365 and some features are limited.

Using Sway, we can upload content directly to Sway and we can build our own customized presentation.

Sway supports OneDrive, so we can add content you have saved there – including graphs you have made in Excel Online.

We can fetch web content. From within Sway, we can search Bing and pull in content directly from sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr. Alternatively, you can search Twitter and pull embedded Tweets directly into Sway. Alternatively, use Sound Cloud to embed audio as well for your presentation.

We can share Sway presentations in many ways and access them from anywhere. It's quite difficult to do this in PowerPoint; we need Office 365 subscription for PowerPoint online.

So let us start with creating a sample presentation on Sway online

• Login to Office 365 portal page, here we will see the Sway app. Below is the screen shot for the same,
  
  

• Once we click on the Sway app on the browser it will take us to a new page where it will open Sway's own site page. We can see here the welcome page on the screen.
  
  

• On this page, we can see there are three options from My Sway called Create New, Start from a topic and Start from a document. Let us one by one, or we can click on the last page, eclipse, and select create new. See below screen shot,
  
  

• As we are going to create a new Sway page, click on create new. Once we click on Create New, it will take us to the Sway design page.
  
  

• It’s  like Power Point but it’s not exactly the same. In  PowerPoint if we open any blank page we will not  see the left side option as we do in the Sway. See the below screen shot,
  
  

• Coming to the Sway page, we will get a storyline created box, the same as with PowerPoint

• To add a new heading or text or any media click on the available left side option to add on the page.

• For example, I have added a few options as default from the left side; just click on  it and it will come to the storyline page automatically.
  
  

• We have a lot of other features available on the Sway page where we can do a lot of customization and create an attractive presentation .

• Let's discuss the features available on Sway one by one:

SWAY Tab: Insert, Cards, Design, Layout, Remix

• Insert
  Using insert we can insert any kind of object to the presentation page, such as add images. We can categorize information from available options. We have many images categorized on this page, we can select the same image or we can add from our system by dragging and dropping features.
  
  
• Cards
  This has contents with heading text, Media and Groups
  
  
• Design
  Give your Sway personality with color, typography, and texture.
  
  
• Layout
  There will be three types of layout available for Sway

Remix Preview of Presentation

So in short, let me open a document file and make it into a presentation,

• Click on insert and select suggested. From here select My Device and add the docs file here.
  
  

• Once you are all done go to preview (Remix) and see the look of the presentation. We need to add images also if you want them in the presentation. Just for testing add a document file and add associated pictures to the same and see the preview
  
  
  
  

• From the Sway home page, select start from the topic and assign a name,
  
  

• Once the name is assigned, click on create outline.

• It will open in the default way, with full feed of data shown below,
  
  

• We can edit the above and can show the same as preview.

Now we will see how to share it with everyone

• Click on share button available in the right side of the screen on the top page, an option will pop up; here we need to share our Sway page with a link. Select as per your requirements
  
  

• Nothing else to do; now your Sway is shared.

I will show you where your pages are stores and how we can open them to make changes, modify, or delete.

• Open Sway page and click on eclipse page and select My sway option shown below,
  
  

• Click on the above and it will take you to the page where all your Sways are available. To open the saved Sways click on selected and it will open in edit mode.
  
  

If we are deleting any Sway presentations,  it will be stored in the Sway  recycle bin and will be deleted automatically after 30 days.