Microsoft Sway a the presentation software and you get there by going to
sway.office.com. We're just going to open up one of these templates
that was provided. You see, automatically it doesn't just look like
a boring slide. It's making choices for you based on a style and it's doing
things like panning pictures, you have to scroll to the right to get through the
story, and you can customize these things which is what we're going to go over in
a second. If I go into the upper right hand corner and I click these three dots,
it's going to bring me back to the main screen. We're going to start a
blank Sway so that we can talk through how to build it and then what these
different design choices mean. I'm going to title this Life by the Lake and, what
you're looking at here, they're calling it a card. We can add a background
picture to the card. We can style it a little bit up here. When we're done
with that, you go down to the plus to add your next piece of content. First
we're going to add a background picture. Sway wants to search Bing for your
pictures but, just to make sure I'm just showing my own content, I'm just going to
grab a picture off my hard drive. I clicked on my device and I put a
little picture here. Notice that, when you're putting these pictures on, you
can't really tell what it's going to look like and that's because there's a
lot of flexibility in how these are displayed. You put the content on here
first and then you look at how you want it to be shown. I made my title card
here and it has the picture with it. I want to have some more content below
it. You do this by adding another card. Let's add a header card. You
see there's only one heading here. After you add a heading, then the choice for a
heading two will appear. But, since there's only one, it doesn't make sense
to offer heading two. Now we're going to say that the first thing that you want
to do is to learn the different types of knots. I'm going to go down to the
green plus sign underneath this card and add my next card . I'm going to add
some text below it. Microsoft Sway wants to treat
this text differently than the header so it's going to give you another box and
you're going to have a fresh menu of options on how to style the text.
They have these kind of standard text styling options here, but if you'll
notice, they aren't called bold and they aren't called italic because what
they're going to do is going to change depending on the style that you choose.
If I want to emphasize learn how to make a loop because I feel that's
important, I'm going to select that. But, it's not necessarily going to make it
just bold. I'm going to add a new group because this is going to be kind
of a new thought. We're going to do a comparison group just to show you how
some different functions work that they have in this comparison card. You can
see these cards are pre-built for the functionality that it's going to be and
it's waiting for a comparison. In order to do that, for some reason it
put them below, but all you really have to do is just drag them up. We're
going to pull this image card into that comparison and we're going to pull this
one into there. You can give them a caption if you want. It's hard to tell
how this caption is going to end up until you preview the Sway. I'll say this
one is just water right. Ehh, how about water with Islands. Now we've made a little
Sway. There's obviously other design types. You can embed some code. There's
another video on how to do that. You can search for content and put in there. But,
right now, the point of this video is just to show you how to create one and
then show you how to style it. We have enough content to go into design. I go
in the upper left-hand corner and I click on design. First, it's going to
bring you to a preview of it. I didn't make any of these choices here. This Sway
just chose for me and it just thought it was a good starting point. You can
scroll to the right. Here's the background image and my title. You
can see that it applies different styling to the header. This is the header and
this is a text box that I put in the same group as the header.
I emphasized this text so it didn't just make it bold,
it made it bold and red. You don't really know that until you look at the
styling. This is a comparison. These stories are supposed to be
interactive. On each of these, you can left-click to see the caption or you can
click on the slider and compare the images. Maybe those aren't the best two
images to compare, but you see what I'm doing right now! If you want to style
this differently, go in the upper right hand corner and click on styles. This,
depending on your opinion, this is either the greatest thing or the worst thing
about Sway. This is the main dashboard for styling your content and it wants
you to basically choose a design and it's going to apply it for you. So if
you're used to PowerPoint, where you control exactly where everything goes on
the screen. You control the font size and the color. You just make it look perfect.
That's not what Microsoft is going for here. This is just saying, hey how do you
kind of want me to make your story look? You can also scroll through it
vertically or horizontally or you can make it a slideshow but Sway really
isn't meant to be a slideshow. It's not even really meant to stand in front of
and talk to an audience about. It's just kind of meant to tell a story that you
scroll through. So, I would either do vertical or horizontal. I will just
change it to vertical so we can see something different. It's going to
give you a preview on the left-hand side. If you scroll down, you see what
has changed. One of the things that Sway can do is actually pick your color
palette from an existing picture. You see, if I left click on this image, it's
actually the one that you're seeing on the left, if you left click on it, you
notice all these palettes just changed based on colors that were picked from
this image. We'll pick one of these and it's going to style everything for us.
That's one option for styling, but if we go back, let's look at the
pre-selected options. These previews are trying to tell you what they're going to
do. If we go down to this option, what this is telling you, let's left-click on
it, and it's going to put a red block behind the header. It's going to make your
fonts a serif font. So it's not going to have those
extra kind of a times new roman looking pieces on the end of the letters. It's
just going to be a straight font and it's going to left-align things. If you
notice that these characters are left aligned as opposed to being in the
middle. This one here is just going to put kind of an artistic frame around it.
We're going to play with one more. So you see, Sway's making a lot of choices
for you and this is either making it really easy to make a presentation or
just making it frustrating for you and you should use PowerPoint. Once you
have this looking the way that you want it, to share it just go in the upper
right hand corner and click share. This will give you different options on
how to send it out. If you're using this through Office 365, if you have a
paid account, then you can send it to those in your organization. This will
keep it locked down and it's not available to the public. But, if you want
to open it up, you can make it available to anyone with the link. You would
just send this link out to whomever you want. You can do it in an email, you could
put it in social media, you could embed it in a website. If you left click on
get embed code, it's going to give you code like this that's meant to be copied
and pasted into the source of say a blog or another website. Those are
the different ways to share a Sway. I hope that was helpful. If you like this
video and you want to see others like it, please click in the lower right-hand
corner. If you want notifications when the new videos come, out you can
click on that little picture of a bell. Thanks!