What is Microsoft Sway, and What Can I Do with It?
As part of Microsoft’s push towards cloud and mobile apps, it has invested in several cloud-only additions to the old Office apps with which you’re familiar. One of these is Sway, a friendlier alternative to PowerPoint.
Why Does Microsoft Need a PowerPoint Alternative?
If you’ve ever worked in an office environment, you most likely associate PowerPoint with shiny-suited salespeople and managers with no public speaking skills. That’s not entirely fair, because you can produce brilliant presentations in PowerPoint. But, life isn’t fair, and PowerPoint is a big, heavy, corporate tool with a matching reputation.
Enter Sway, which is Microsoft’s attempt to provide a lightweight, cloud-only, story-telling application that is easier to use than PowerPoint and provides more narrative devices than simply slide after slide of bullet points.
Can Anybody Use It?
Anybody can use Sway if they sign up for a free Microsoft account. People with an Office 365 can also use Sway. There are some differences between the free version and the Office 365 version, but these are mainly on the admin side and let you do things like password protect a Sway (oh yeah, Sway documents are called “Sways”) or remove the footer. There are also some differences in how much content you can fit into a single Sway, but the free version still provides more than enough for the average user.
Let’s take a look at why you might want to use Sway.
What Can I Do With Sway?
If there’s one thing more intimidating than staring at a blank Word document wondering what to write, it’s staring at a blank PowerPoint presentation wondering what to add. Presentations are by their nature intended for others to view, and plenty of people are terrified of public speaking to start with, so a blank PowerPoint can be enough to make you give up then and there.
This fear has always been one of the biggest problems with PowerPoint. Thankfully Microsoft has recognized this, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent this fear with Sway. Most people are not specialists in design and layout, so Microsoft has provided a bunch of templates (18 at the time of writing) for common presentations to help get you past the creator’s block and started designing.