Microsoft releases Sway presentation service and new Windows 10 app

“With Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7, Microsoft continued the evolution of the Start screen by adding live tiles which surface relevant and personal information to the user from apps and services”, says The Industrial Designers Society of America.

Sway integrates with a wide variety of Internet services like YouTube and Twitter so users can easily embed content from the Web into their presentations. Sway is also rolling out to eligible Office 365 for business and education users worldwide. Microsoft noted in the announcement that the feedback was “invaluable”, and, as a result, the company updated functions or created new ones, such as multi-user collaboration and photo cropping. There are some caveats to that which you’ll learn about below but this feature has the potential to speed up the downloading of Windows 10 updates for most. It’s important to note that Microsoft isn’t billing Sway as a replacement to PowerPoint, and instead it’s supposed to be a supplementary offering.

And indeed, Sway isn’t exactly entirely new – it’s a variation on the well established presentation theme – but it is different and it’s good to see Microsoft delivering something new and exciting – let’s hope the company does more of it! This impartially bestowed Digital Design 2015 award validates the work that the Microsoft engineers have done.

Miller said Sway presents better because Microsoft has worked to ensure a high-fidelity output regardless of the device upon which consumers are viewing the presentation. You can now capture and then add photos using your computer’s built-in camera, for instance, as well as view content offline and simultaneously use multiple accounts.

Docs.com serves as a hub where people can publish MS Office documents for public viewing. Users can also access analytics of Docs.com files and viewers can comment on your files. You can use a browser extension to redirect Bing queries to any search engine you choose.

The Sway team is planning to bring Sway to Windows Phone.

It’s still very much a work in progress, at least according to the Microsoft blog, and a number of the features that were promised when it was announced still aren’t fully operational.

When will Sway be generally available?