Introduction to Microsoft Office Sway

The literal meaning of sway is to swing to and fro, and as your mind gets new ideas and you want to quickly put them on paper, Microsoft Office Sway is the tool. Let's take a quick tour of Microsoft Office Sway, a new app by Microsoft as part of the Office family of products. In its most basic form, Sway allows anyone to create a beautiful website from text, videos and images, it is a modern and simpler version of FrontPage. Despite that, Microsoft is taking an interesting approach with Sway, using the company’s powerful Azure cloud servers to suggest page layouts and quickly render content on the fly.

When you click on Office 365 tab, you get the Sway app icon as in the following:



In the welcome screen, you will see some pointers on how to get started and what you can create.



So, click on Get Started and you can learn from existing sways that are created or start building your own.



When you click Create New, you will see the following screen. You will see a card-based layout and icons on the left where you can add text and media files and also create groups of content.



I began with a sample as to how 3D printing is changing the world. Click on the Insert Tab and here you can search images from various sources on the internet.



You can simply click on the image or video or Twitter feed and add it to your webpage.



You can click on the Design tab to choose from one of the various design options.



On the navigation tab, you will see the three options Scroll Vertically, Scroll Horizontally and Optimized for Presentation.



Once your Sway is created you can share it as appropriate.



I personally found it very interesting to create tutorials, reports, dashboards, newsletters and presentations.