David Briddock investigates Microsoft’s intriguing new addition to the Office family
Microsoft’s Office portfolio is regularly subjected to product updates and refreshes, but it’s rare to see a new addition to the Office family. Yet on 1st October 2014, Microsoft announced Sway, a brand new Microsoft Office app, destined to be a key element in the forthcoming Windows 10 rollout, due some time this summer.
Sway Is Different
Sway, just like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, is focused on content creation, but there the similarity ends. Sway offers a brand new approach to authoring content. The core concept is to turn any browser into a story-telling digital canvas. A dynamic, interactive canvas without borders, edges, page breaks or cells, which is easily filled with text, photos and images plus multimedia in the form of audio and video clips.
In a recent blog post Microsoft said, “It’s a new way for you to create a beautiful, interactive, web-based expression of your ideas, from your phone or browser. It is easy to share your creation, and it looks great on any screen.”
This means Sway opens up new possibilities. For instance, you could publish daily photo diaries, non-linear presentations and other interactive content that would usually require specialist tools and knowledge.
Browser And Cloud
To create or view a Sway, all you need is a browser. Any browser will do, which means you’re free to create and view Sways using the full range of computing platforms, including smartphones, tablets, laptops or desktops.
The final product is quite different from a traditional document. At the end of the creative process, you’ll have something called a Sway, composed from a blend of ingredients and stored in the cloud.
These cloud-native Sways aren’t contained within a single file type or format, which makes them very different from other office apps like Word, Excel or PowerPoint. In addition, a Sway automatically adapts to the host platform’s native screen dimensions.
Now, let’s take a closer look at how to compose a Sway, how collaboration works, the presentation options and the various ways you can share a Sway.
Sway Composition
With the Sway app it’s a straightforward task to combine a rich combination of text and media content. This content may be pulled from a local storage system, from cloud storage sites like OneDrive or from internet services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As the product matures, this import list will be extended.
Sway aids the composition process via a set of semiautomated layouts. What does this mean in practice? Firstly, as you import text, photos, images or multimedia clips into Sway, it uses a built-in algorithm to determine the most appropriate layout for this particular piece of content. This content-driven process uses the same kind of advanced software that filters and organises mixed-media Bing search results.
Secondly, the Sway app assists authors by intelligently arranging content into the assigned layout in a smart, handsoff yet polished-looking manner. These layouts automatically transform each content item into the most appropriate format, depending on the editing/viewing platform, so a smartphone layout looks quite different to a desktop one, for instance.
For the author it boils down to a rapid, hassle-free authoring process. As if by magic, every text element, image, multimedia clip, Tweet and so on is instantly incorporated and arranged in a ready-to-view Sway.
Sway Design
Of course, once these automatic steps have taken place, you’re free to change anything you’d like.
What you’ll see is a collection of high-level topics, presented as a selection of titled image cards and navigated in a 2D or 3D style flow. You can change the card order or select a particular card to view the details and begin editing.
For example, you could change the title, textual content, move elements, add and remove images, embed a video, choose a new colour theme or even select a different layout style.
Sway is full of tools that simplify editing, so if you’d like a particular photo to be more prominent, you don’t have to start playing with pixel dimensions. Instead, just tap the image and select the appropriate number of stars from a menu.
Rearranging elements is just as easy. Simply drag them around, and they snap into the locations defined by the current layout style. Another composition trick involves ranking items in terms of importance. This helps Sway to ascertain the overall flow of content.
And remember, every addition, modification or deletion is instantly saved back to the cloud. This ensures your Sway is always up to date, just as we’ve come to expect with cloudstored OneNote documents, for instance.
Sway Collaboration
Until very recently, Sway creation was down to a single author, but this all changed after a ‘Share’ button appeared in the new Sway preview, so now there’s a number of ways to control the visibility of a partly or fully completed Sway.
Selecting ‘Public’ means the Sway can be found by anyone searching the web, while the ‘People with the link’ option limits access only to those sent a Sway link, and specifying ‘Just me’ means it’s restricted to people using the creator’s login information.
This feature means family members, friends, colleagues and other invitees can co-author a Sway. When they click on the link and log in, the Sway shows up on their personal ‘My Sways’ page, with an icon to indicate it’s a shared Sway, and, because every time the Sway is edited it’s saved back to the cloud, everyone sees the ‘live’ Sway.
If a group of people edit a Sway at the same time, you’ll see their account information displayed along with their names. You can also see which parts of a Sway are currently being edited, because their initials are displayed next to the card they’re currently working on. If there’s an editing clash, then the last one to make an edit wins.
Importantly, overall control is always retained by the original Sway owner, which means it’s a straightforward task for this owner to remove other editors or revoke any existing edit and share links.
Sway Scenarios
Sway is an ideal tool for capturing live events in real-time – for example, if you’re attending a conference, a sporting event or taking part in a school field trip. Before, you’d probably snap a few photos, then try to organise a future time slot long enough to build a presentation. With Sway, the motto is ‘do it now’, and Sway’s ability to capture and present in a non-linear manner adds to the creative possibilities.
But what if all you have with you is a Windows Phone mobile device? Well, you can still create a Sway quite easily using the Cortana personal assistant.
With Cortana, you just speak to create titles and textual content, then quickly insert a collection of on-the-move photos. A few screen taps later and the whole thing is sent to Sway’s intelligent design engine, which automatically builds the Sway and saves it to the cloud.
Sway is also perfect for interactive group-based activities. A typical scenario would be in a classroom where the teacher and students can work together and witness a Sway taking shape right in front of their eyes. Anyone could contribute an idea, a text snippet, a sketch or drawing, a sound clip or video stream.
Due to the flexibility of Sway, the class could even be split into groups, each one creating a different Sway. The resulting Sways could then be merged together to form a single collaborative Sway.
And by sharing the Sway link, other teachers, other students and even parents can see view the product of their creative endeavours.
App Previews
The initial, and it has to be said rather limited, Sway preview appeared on 1st October 2014. Unfortunately, this was by invitation only, but by December 2014 Microsoft had the confidence to invite the public to download a new Sway preview.
In case you might be thinking Sway is a premium-level product in the Microsoft Office suite, there’s no need to worry. Sway will be available for free, just like Windows 10 itself.
In fact, it gets even better. Sway is destined to become a Windows 10 Universal app, and that means it’s not only available on Windows 10, but it’s also be free to download for Windows Phone, Apple iOS and Google Android platforms.
In addition, subscribers to the popular cloud-hosted Office 365 app suite can look forward to receiving enhanced interapp collaboration capabilities around the time of the official launch, and anyone who’s paid for the full version of Office can look forward to a Sway update soon, possibly one with enhanced integration features.
Feedback And Future
What’s the thinking behind releasing the Sway app at such an early point in the development cycle? And why is Microsoft releasing Sway previews so frequently?
Well, the answer is Microsoft is intent on making Sway the first publicly collaborative Office product, one in which many of its features and functionality are influenced by an interactive partnership between the Microsoft development team and the Sway user community.
For Microsoft, this is a radically different approach to app development. With classic Office apps like PowerPoint, a very small team made all the design decisions about the sort of features people might want.
With Sway, it’s feedback that helps drive many of the team’s decisions, and this feedback helps determine the urgency or importance of each feature and helps refine the Sway team’s project planning and scheduling.
So whenever you find Sway mentioned on a Microsoft website, you’ll also notice messages encouraging everyone to send feedback. Feedback can be sent by the usual communication and social channels, but there’s also the Swayspecific UserVoice page (goo.gl/HhYrDd) to simplify the feedback process still further.
Of course, involving a large community means there are bound to be many interesting ideas that a small Microsoft team wouldn’t have thought of by themselves. It’s an approach that’s already been used for the public releases of the new Microsoft Edge (previously Project Spartan) browser and Windows 10 itself, via Microsoft’s Windows Insiders Program (insider.windows.com).
It’s still very early days with Sway. There’s lots more development to do before the app is finally released, so any feedback you provide today may well make its way into the final product, and then you could say, “That’s the feature I suggested.”
Even better, all you need to view a Sway is a browser, so anyone can click on a Sway link to discover what others have already achieved with this app, plus the sort of events that have been captured, and in the process expose ideas about how to incorporate Sway into everyday life.
2015 Updates
In early March 2015 Microsoft announced a new Sway preview showcasing the latest feature set. One new feature is the ability to add images saved in the OneNote application to their presentations. Options include selecting from the most recently saved OneNote images or picking images directly from OneNote notebooks.
This is just the first incarnation of OneNote integration, and Microsoft is looking for feedback on importing other types of OneNote media into Sway. As it says, “Before we add more functionality, as part of Sway Preview, we want to make sure we understand which additional capabilities you would like to see from OneNote integration.”
Images are an important ingredient for any Sway. Now the team has added two more methods to help make them more interactive and engaging. Firstly there’s the image comparison feature, where you use a slider to visually compare two images overlaying each other, rather than having to view them side by side. As the slider moves, it gradually hides one image so you can see more of the other. Simply choose the images to be compared and select the Card Comparison option.
Secondly there’s slideshow, which is an ideal way to present all your images in one place. Here you can view multiple images in the form of a carousel, as a thumbnail-centric slideshow or under manual slider control. Once again, slideshow creation is quick and easy; just select a set of images and create a Slideshow card.
Following Sway feedback, the team has also ensured it’s simple to copy a Sway. This means you can take an existing Sway and use it as a starting point for a new creation. Maybe you’d like to build a Sway collection that captures the progress of a project over time, or maybe a teacher wants to give their students a basic Sway layout example for a specific classroom project.
In addition, there are more multimedia import options, which now include Office Mix, Infogr.am and Mixcloud, as well as from existing Sways. There’s a larger range of photo layout options too, and the improved Sway search function offers ‘suggestions’ related to Tweets and YouTube videos.
More To Come
We’ll certainly see more Sway previews over the next few months, with more features to explore like additional styles and layouts, improved editing options and greater language support. And that means more opportunities to provide Microsoft with the sort of feedback that’ll influence the future of Sway.
So head on over to sway.com and try it out for yourself.