Meet Sway, Microsoft's own PowerPoint rival
PowerPoint might still be the industry standard for creating presentations, but the program is as old as your intern, has a terrible reputation (even the Army is distressed at its overreliance on PowerPoint slides) and is losing some ground to newer, more innovative online presentation tools like Prezi. Perhaps for some of these reasons, Microsoft (MSFT) has released its own PowerPoint competitor, Sway. And for certain kinds of projects, it might be worth considering.
First and foremost, Sway is both free and Web-based. There's nothing to install (and as of right now, there's no mobile app, though that might change). It's sort of like a mash-up of Word, PowerPoint and popular web-publishing software WordPress. Sway is designed to make it easy to create simple presentations that you share and play back from the cloud.
It's also a work in progress. The first thing you'll find is that many of Sway's formatting and style options are marked "Coming Soon." That's OK, though, because it's already more than functional enough to give you a taste of its potential, and you can make some perfectly serviceable presentations already.
At the core, Sway lets you build a presentation that -- unlike PowerPoint, which is built around decks of slides -- is one long scrolling document that interleaves images and text. You can scroll the presentation from side to side or up and down.
Interestingly, Sway isn't designed to edit in a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) mode. Instead, you add images, text and formatting in the app's minimalist Storyline view, and then preview what it'll look like to other people.
That might feel like a step backwards, but I quickly became attached to the simplified Storyline. You click a plus sign to add a new node to your storyline -- text or image, for example -- and then type, paste or upload as needed.
When it comes to incorporating images in your presentation, you can choose from photos stored on your PC or in OneDrive, or even use Creative Common images from Bing's image search. In keeping with the app's simple approach to presentation design, you don't specify the image's size. Instead, you choose from among three sizes, and Sway does the rest.
To format your presentation, tap the oddly named Mood tab. There, you can choose vertical or horizontal scrolling, as well as set overall text styling and background from a half-dozen templates. Because only a handful of formatting features are available, it doesn't take long at all to learn almost all of Sway's nuances.
And once you do, you'll probably realize that although Sway plays in the same space as PowerPoint, it's notably different. Sway presentations come out much more text heavy than what you'd be inclined to make with PowerPoint or Prezi -- more like an online brochure, perhaps, or an interactive article you'd read in an iPad magazine app.
Nonetheless, when your presentation is complete, it's already saved online. You can share it on Facebook, Twitter, embedded in a blog or web page, or via a direct link in email.
Sway feels like a one of Microsoft's experiments. It has created a platform for making online presentations that are simpler than PowerPoint but also seem to blur the line between a traditional text document and visuals for a presentation. What Microsoft eventually does with this tool probably depends upon how well received it is. So, explore it now -- it's free.
