With Sway, Microsoft Reimagines Presentations For The Post-PowerPoint Generation
Instead
of reworking its decades-old presentation software, the company is
attempting something new—and asking its users to help build it.
When Chris Pratley and his team ask for user feedback on of reworking its decades-old presentation software, the company is
attempting something new—and asking its users to help build it.
Microsoft Sway, they sometimes have to emphasize that they’re not
building PowerPoint all over again.
At a glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Sway
is a new tool that lets users string together images, text, and bullet
points in a visually arresting way. In other words, Sway creates
presentations, much like PowerPoint. It’s even part of the Microsoft
Office suite, having just shed its "Preview" designation after 10 months
of private and public testing.
But as Pratley points out, Sway isn’t meant for the same exact
audience as PowerPoint. It’s a much simpler program, with far fewer
controls, and most of its formatting is automatic, so each Sway can
adapt to any screen size on a PC, tablet, or phone. The fact that you
can’t tweak things down to the individual pixel, as with PowerPoint, is
by design. "Anything where you’re building a complicated layout, that’s
really a PowerPoint scenario, and not a Sway one," says Pratley, who is
Sway’s founder and general manager.
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