Microsoft Sway allows anyone to tell stories beautifully

ALWAYS wished you could create beautiful presentations and websites but don’t know how? Microsoft has the answer.

Microsoft has changed the Office game

POWERPOINT might be included in Office 2016, but everyone knows it’s so passé.

These days it’s all about Sway — the first of many native apps to be rolled out to Microsoft Office 365 subscribers.

To put it simply, Sway is a web browser-based storytelling app. It allows anyone with the most basic computing knowledge to create beautiful-looking websites and presentations with images, text, tweets, videos or whatever other media you want to include. It works a bit like Word and Powerpoint combined — and finished products can be used on websites to display family photos, or in a beautiful work presentation.

“The interface is based around a storyline, which allows users to bring in raw content such as PDFs, spreadsheets, graphs, photos, video and text,” a spokesman for Microsoft told news.com.au.

When creating a new presentation, users begin with a blank page containing nothing more than a title card. From there, add raw content, such as photos or text, and either place it all where desired or use a template that does the work for you.

“It is as simple as clicking and dragging the content the user wants to add the presentation,” the spokesman said.

An impressive feature that sets this application apart from the likes of Powerpoint is its integration with popular social media networking sites.

Users can import pictures from Facebook, YouTube videos, tweets and other content without having to leave the app.

Once happy with the content included, users can tweak its appearance by using the “Remix” feature.

This will cycle the appearance of the presentation through the many templates available in the app.

Microsoft has completely embraced the cloud with Sway, with work available to view through a web browser on any device the moment its finished. The work can then be shared on social media or even embedded on other websites. Best of all, it’s all adaptive, which means that no matter what screen is used, it will always look good.

This journalist travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Microsoft.