Yes, you will (hopefully) interact with your audience while speaking to a PowerPoint presentation, but there is little interaction functionality in the actual product. With straight-up PowerPoint, you can create presentations which are essentially a one-way form of communication. But it doesn’t take long to see how Mix represents a new way of thinking. Office Mix is the more traditional of the two new Office solutions, since it’s really an add-in for PowerPoint. And two of its most recent offerings-Office Mix and Office Sway-are interesting, forward-leaning examples of how authoring in Office is changing.
This story originally appeared as " Microsoft adds new Sway presentation application to the Office family " on ZDNet.While old-school productivity offerings like Word, Excel and PowerPoint are still very much core to the Office experience, Microsoft has really stretched the boundaries of what it means to be an Office app over the past year. Microsoft officials will be granting applicants access to the preview on a staggered basis. The product will be available to users anywhere, though US English support is the team's first priority. PT on October 1 to put their names on a wait list. Users interested in trying Sway can go to as of 9 a.m.
Microsoft officials made a point of noting that the company is making available the Sway preview at a very early point in its life cycle - a very similar message to what the Windows 10 team said yesterday regarding its Enterprise Technical Preview - in order to incorporate tester feedback into the product as it evolves. Microsoft has made available a YouTube video showing more about the way Sway works. At its outset, Sway is more of a consumer app than a business one, as functionality like OneDrive for Business, SharePoint and Office Graph integration are not available yet. The mobile piece is Sway's support for a variety of mobile devices, not just those running Microsoft's operating systems.Īmong the type of projects that lend themselves to sways are book reports, Web sites or even marketing brochures and other small-business-focused content. That's the cloud piece of the "mobile first, cloud first" mantra Microsoft execs are chanting these days. Photos used to create Sways are saved in Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage app. Users' sways are stored in Microsoft's Azure cloud. The completed digital output that Sway users create are called "Sways." Users can share Sways with others, even those without the app installed, through links and on various supported social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Sway allows users to choose among a variety of layout types, both linear and non-linear.
While Microsoft's OneNote also is an aggregation app, Microsoft officials said they consider OneNote to be more of a place to organize ideas, while Sway is more of a presentation app allowing users to share finished ideas. PowerPoint, Office Mix and OneNote are all examples. Sway is a potential complement to some other Microsoft Office applications, though at this point, there's no direct integration between them. Microsoft trademarked "Sway" in September 2014.) (A quick note on the Remix codename: While some of us Microsoft watchers thought "Remix" was the codename for another new Office app, called Mix, it now seems as though Remix was actually the codename for Sway instead.
Microsoft plans to make Sway previews available for devices running Google's Android and its own Windows Phone software in the coming months, as well. The preview also will be available at some time in the not-too-distant future for iOS, Apple's mobile operating system. Microsoft is releasing on Wednesday a preview of Sway, a new Office content aggregation and presentation application.Ĭodenamed "Remix," the Sway preview initially will be available as a Web app accessible via several different browsers, including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.