I’m planning a trip to England for later in the spring, and as I was researching Microsoft’s Sway application, I decided I have to use it during my vacation.

I’m an avid photographer and scrapbooker, documenting special occasions and vacations that my family takes. But since I won’t be travelling with some of my family members on this trip, I thought creating Sway presentations each day would be a great way to let them know what I’m doing. This is because the content is easy to share with anyone who has a browser, without installing any additional software. (I can also change the privacy settings for more control over what is shared.)

As well, I can later use the Sways as a basis for the scrapbook that I will make about the trip when I get home.

What makes the digital storytelling application great is that it combines text, photos and video into one package, and does the design work for you. The engineers who built the application wanted it to be easy and to do more than just using predesigned templates.

Working with Microsoft’s professional designers, the application was created to tap into their talent, allowing those of us without any design skills to create newsletters, reports, and presentations with interactive elements, letting the software make design choices.

Sway is an alternative to Microsoft’s own Power Point, which is more static and purportedly not as easy to use, as well as other popular applications such as Prezi, Google Slides, and Haiku. It’s been called a personal design assistant that will do all the work, coming out with a polished end product.

Another plus is that the content looks great on any device — phones, laptops, desktop computers, tablets — that have different sizes and orientations, adapting the layout and optimizing it for each one.

Other features of Sway:

  • It’s also a collaboration tool — because it’s cloud-based — and members of a team located in different places can develop a presentation together.
  • Sway can suggest searches to help you find relevant images, videos and other content to drop into your creation.
  • Sway is free to use for anyone with a Microsoft Account (Hotmail, Live, or Outlook.com). More sophisticated Sways can be created when Sway is used as part of an Office 365 subscription.
  • Content can be added easily by dragging and dropping videos or files from a computer, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or cloud storage.

Learn more about using Sway with Velsoft’s latest computer course. Click here.