Microsoft Office "Sway"

For the first time in a long time Microsoft are going to add a new application to the Office suite. Unless they change the name between now and when they release it, and Microsoft are good at changing the names of things, then the new application going into Office is called Sway. From the information I can find it would appear that Sway has been in development for about two years.

From what I can work out Sway is a kind of presentation application that sort of fits somewhere between Word and Powerpoint.

As is the case with anything new these days, Sway is designed for use from the Web with portable devices (which means tablets and smartphones) and it leverages the cloud (which basically just means it can store things on the Web for use 'anywhere'). From what I have read and seen so far Sway basically takes a stream of images or photographs and allows them to be presented with text and audio blended in.

I think that the playback of the Sway 'presentation' is device aware so it re-arranges itself to suit the playback device, a bit like how SquareSpace 7 re-arranges Web sites like Abalook to suit whether the viewer is using a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer.

If you are the slightest bit interested you can find out more about Sway at the Microsoft Office Blog (the link to the Office blog is in the sidebar), or you can have a look at a demonstration of Sway called "Photography 101" by clicking on the image below.

Barry.