Sway

Sway brings to the table a new way of creating presentations, where can focus on content rather than formatting options and layout. Its aim is to allow anyone to easily and quickly build engaging interactive content that can be shared across multiple devices without compromising on looks.

Only available on Windows 10, Microsoft's Sway is presented as a 'digital storytelling app' that can be used to generate visually-appealing reports, newsletters, lessons, presentations and other projects that keep up the pace with today's design trends.

Focusing on simplicity, Sway doesn't offer as much editing and formatting tools as its older brother, Powerpoint does. It is not addressed to those who like to control everything in their presentation. Its intelligent design engine automatically chooses fonts, crops photos, and places elements in such a way that the final product stands out and impresses the target audience.

Sway offers more editing options as you progress from the title to the credits, without overcrowding the working environment. Presentations can include text sections with editable fields to emphasize important phrases, apply bullets and numbering, or insert hyperlinks.

To catch the attention of your audience, Sway enables you to integrate multimedia content (photos, videos, tweets, charts) or local Office documents, and even embed code from different websites to insert maps or playable audio files.

What catches the eye is the content suggestions. Sway retrieves online images (tagged with free-to-use licenses), posts on social media, Youtube clips, OneDrive and OneNote documents, and more. It can even use your computer's webcam to capture new content and insert it into the presentation or group images together and quickly build small slideshows, stacks, grids or side-by-side comparison boxes.

The content you drag and drop into your storyline is already cropped and centered, but you can tamper with Sway's design decisions using so-called focal points. These are main areas of interest in an image, which Sway uses to position an image, selecting the best layout.

There are various design templates with different colors and textures that you can freely customize to create the perfect look for your presentation. Each template includes several color palettes (which can be changed to use one of the photos in the slideshow as a source of inspiration) and matching font styles.

Presentations can be shared via Docs.com, published on Facebook or Twitter or embedded into a webpage. Moreover, you can share a link to let others watch it in a browser. On the downside, the slideshow cannot be saved offline.

Powered by your creativity, Sway provides a faster and easier alternative to other presentation creation tools. Instead of working on each slide one by one, you create a storyline that smoothens the transition between topics and flows as you swipe, simply slinging together components and letting Sway decide about the layout and the design.

As you progress in creating the presentation, you can switch views to the 'Preview' panel to check out the final result. And even if you let Sway take all the design decisions, there's a good chance you might end up being surprised with the output.