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"Sway...helps you quickly and easily produce professional, interactive, and visually appealing designs from images, text, documents, videos, maps, and more."
Here we introduce you to the basic features of a Sway interactive presentation. This compliments our presentations pages which give you a lot of information about what makes a good presentation, from structure and design to delivery.
Sway is part of Microsoft 365 - access it by going to Microsoft 365 and browsing the list of apps.
What is Sway?
Sway is an example of 'docuslide' software - that is, it is half way between a document and a slide show. Sways should be designed for self-navigation with no need for a presenter so that the viewer can take as much time as they need to take in the information. Because of this, you can put a lot more information onto a Sway than a slideshow, you are also encouraged to make it a lot more visual than a document.
Features of Sway
How to Sway is an example Sway created by Microsoft which demonstrates all of the features you can use:
- Customise the look of your Sway, or use an existing style/template
- Add text, images, videos and animated GIFs
- Embed a form to ask your reader questions
- Group your images in stacks or slideshows, or create a comparison between two images
This is a Sway that uses a vertical format, so, once you open it, just scroll or swipe down to see the content.
Creating a Sway
Structuring
Sways are made up of a number of 'cards'. So, you would have a card for your title, a card for each heading (which can include background images), a card for text, a card for images, a card for a video etc.
Sways are unusual in that you can decide whether they are structured vertically (you scroll/swipe down like a webpage) or horizontally (you scroll/swipe right like a book). But you don't need to worry about that until you have planned your story, Sway will do all the hard work of making things fit.
You can either plan the story of your Sway before you start (if you use Word or PowerPoint for this, you can create your Sway directly from it), or you can plan it directly in Sway using Storyline view.
Just remember, like with an essay or a presentation, a Sway will need a clear beginning, middle and end.
Adding your content
When you first open Sway, and want to create a new one, choose either Create new or Start from a document (use the latter if you have planned things out already in Word or PowerPoint). We do not recommend using Start from a topic as this pulls things through from Wikipedia and it is not suitable for academic work at university level! Once you choose, you will be in Storyline view.
If you haven't already planned things, you can do it directly in this view - just keep adding headings rather than all the other content to plan out your narrative - you can rearrange them quite easily by dragging.
As part of your plan, you should have an idea of the sort of content you want to add. It really is quite straightforward - just give your Sway a title and use the + button to add new material.
Designing
You don't really do a lot of design work in Sway, it does it for you. Switch to your Design tab (top left) and then click on Styles over on the far right. Try different designs to see which you like best. You can even click the Remix button to get suggestions (and you can always undo).
This short video from Microsoft gives a great introduction to using the software, including using both Storyline and Design view.
Tips for using Sway
- Make sure that your Sway is accessible - click on the three dots at the top right and choose 'Accessibility Checker'.
- Follow the same basic guidelines included on our presentations pages to make sure that your Sway has a coherent structure and design - just replace the word 'slide' for 'card' as you read.
- Once you have a card set up with the format you want, you can then copy and paste it elsewhere in the same Sway or a different one to save time.
- You can share your Sway with others in the same way as other 365 documents - click on the Share button, choose who you want to share with and whether you want them to edit or view only, and copy the link.
Other resources for learning Sway
Examples of Sways
- Facilitation TechniquesA Sway the Skills Team use during PASS training - this is text based.
- Torrents of AmberA vertical Sway where images drive the narrative.
We also recommend looking at the Sways from the Microsoft Educator Community that are at the bottom of your Sway homepage - they include examples of horizontal and slide-show designs.
