Sway in Office 365

Sway offers workers a tool to create touch-enabled presentations and share them over the Web to a variety of devices. Office Sway is a Microsoft Azure-hosted application to create “canvases” or interactive storyboards of content in a Web browser or mobile client application. Sway is independent from PowerPoint, and its canvases could be easier for users without professional design support to create and share online.

Sway canvases are continuous and scrollable, and they work with touch, cursor, or keyboard navigation. Sway performs automatic layout of canvas content to fit devices and can quickly switch among designs (some of which are shown here) with coordinated color schemes, fonts, and other elements. Photos and videos can be added from OneDrive, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or devices, and canvases can be shared to Facebook or Twitter as a link or embedded in a Web page. Sway client applications are available for iPhone, iPad, and Windows 10 (tablets and PCs).

Sway has received many improvements since its Aug. 2015 launch, including a recycle bin to enable self-service restore of deleted presentations, controls to enable and disable Sway for specific users, improved controls for external sharing, embedding of charts and reports from the Microsoft-hosted Power BI service, and the ability to restrict sources of images in Sway presentations (which can be useful for preventing copyright violations). Improvements rolling out or likely in 2017 include audit reports (to enable organizations to track how Sway is used), embedding of SharePoint and other Office 365 data in Sway presentations, and implementation in more Azure data centers.