How to use Microsoft Sway - tutorial for beginners

hi everyone my name is Kevin today I want to show you how you can both get and also use Microsoft's way as full disclosure before we jump into this I work at Microsoft as a full time employee first off what is Microsoft's way well Microsoft's way allows you to create visually stunning documents presentations newsletters and communications in a matter of minutes now I've been playing around with sway and I'm by no means a designer and I added some content in and I was able to make it look gorgeous in just a matter of moments so if I could do it you could certainly do it as well now one of the best parts about sway is that it's entirely free it won't cost you anything to use and there are two different versions of sway you can either use it on the web there's also a Windows app but the Windows app simply serves as a container for the web version of sway so whichever one you use you'll get the exact same functionality today I'm going to show it on the web and show you how to get started with it well instead of me describing and explaining what sway does why don't we jump on the PC and first off I'll show you how you could get it and then I'll show you how you could use it Here I am on my PC and to get Microsoft's way let's head to the website office.com once you land on office.com click on sign-in when you click on sign-in this will drop us on the sign-in screen and if you already have a Microsoft account you can go ahead and type it in here and then sign in if you don't have an account yet you could create one creating a new account is entirely free it's not gonna cost you anything so once you either create an account or you sign in the next thing that'll happen is you'll land on the authenticated page of office comm on office comm not only are we going to get to sway from here but you also get all of these other productivity tools as well you get Outlook you get free cloud storage space with onedrive you get Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote you get all of these different apps now one thing you might notice is sway is not part of the initial set of apps here to get to sway we need like on all apps and then there's an option here that says sway another way that we can also get to sway regardless of where you happen to be in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem you could go up here in the top left-hand corner click on the app launcher or the waffle menu and here to click on all apps and then you also will see an option for sway here so either way you go will get you into sway I'll go ahead and click on sway here this drops me on the sway home page and I see a very nice message here welcoming me to sway I want to walk through what some of the capabilities are on the sway start page so first off you have the option to create a new blank sway and we're gonna do that in just a moment so this allows you to start from a blank canvas now you also have the option to start from a topic if I click on that you could type in whatever the topic is and it'll pull in data from Wikipedia to help you get started on a sway and the third option here is you can also start from a document so let's say you have a Word document a PowerPoint or a PDF if you click here you can upload that into sway and then you'll start from that as I look down on the start page I also see this section here that says my sways this is where I can see any of the sways that I've worked on before right here I could also see sways that I viewed so maybe not necessarily sways that I've created but maybe you know a co-worker or a classmate of mine created a sway and I can get back to that as well I can also see analytics related to any of my sways this requires a Microsoft 365 subscription but you can see things like how many people viewed it how long they viewed it for and lastly under deleted you have some file management capabilities where you could recover deleted sways or you could permanently delete sways as I work my way down the page there are also sway templates that you could simply start from so maybe you're not feeling inspired to start your own content and instead you could simply start from existing content they have a few examples like a newsletter resume a business presentation so you could start from this just like in Word Excel PowerPoint you have templates that you can start from and then at the very bottom-2 help inspire you about what you could do with sway sway also has featured sways so you could take a look at those and it'll show you everything that's possible what I want to do is I want to get started with a blank sway just to show you how you can get started let's say if a sway doesn't yet exist so to do that I'm gonna click on create new and this will drop me in Microsoft's way and it looks pretty empty here right now because I haven't created anything yet to orient you to Microsoft's way I want to talk about the layout here so some of the things you'll see is on the top I have these two different tabs one of them is the storyline view and by default I'm dropped within this view the storyline is where I add all of my content into my sway and where I organize the order in which my content appears and then next to that I have another tab called design design is the look and feel of my sway I don't have any content in my sway yet so I won't be able to do that much in design first I'm gonna get some content in and then we'll go and we'll adjust the look and feel of my sway now on the actual page itself you see one con piece of content here this is referred to as a card and I'm gonna add a set of cards to start building out the content within my sway and I need some type of content to build my sway on and I figured there's no better topic than to talk about myself Kevin Stratford so we're gonna make a sway about me and I'll use that to demonstrate how you can use sway and here it says give your sway a title so I'm gonna go ahead and let's simply call it Kevin Stratford and then I'm gonna say a super cool guy because if you state it that makes it true right so there we go there's my header some of the things that I can do if I highlight some text I could emphasize it and then I'll make it bold I could accent that's kind of like italicizing and I could also insert a link here if that's what I would like to do and over here I can associate a background image with my header so if I click on add background image here I see that I could browse from content for many different places so I'm going to click on this drop down I could use suggested images I could also pull in is from onedrive Flickr Bing images picket YouTube or it could even upload from my device here I could search for different images and here I see groups of images so if I click on backgrounds I could see example images one thing that's nice is these are all Creative Commons images meaning that I could use these in my presentation and I don't have to worry about people coming after me and suing me in my case I already have an image that I want to use here so once again I could click on this drop down and I can upload from my device or alternatively what I can also do is I could simply grab the image from my desktop and then I could drop it over here and that will upload my image on the card there's one thing we haven't talked about yet and that is the item here that says focus points when I click on this it pulls up my background photo that I uploaded and here down below you'll see how the image appears on different device types so I could see on a desktop type display or a mobile display what it'll look like now you'll see on the larger display it cuts off part of the image if I set a focus point by clicking on the image what that does is it assures that that portion of the image will be visible so here if I move the focus point down here you see that it shows that part of the image but I want to make sure my face is shown so I'm gonna set the focus point on my face and I think that looks good so I'm gonna click on the X I've inserted my header or my title to my sway and now what I want to do is I want to add an additional card and to do that there's a plus button at the base of this content and if I click on that I can insert additional content types now the first view is suggested so these are the most frequently used types of content I could simply select one of these or I could choose different categories of card types so I could insert text I could insert media like images videos audio I can even embed things like tweets and here if I click on group I could insert groups of content we'll walk through these and I'll show how these different items work but for now I want to insert some text so I'm going to click on text and then select a text block and here I'm gonna paste in some text about myself if any of you are curious I was born in New York City grew up new next door in New Jersey went to school in Michigan and then I moved out to Seattle to work at micro soft so one thing that you might notice with this is I start on the East Coast I move out to the Midwest and then I eventually end up on the west coast so maybe my next stops Hawaii I don't know we'll see what happens I wouldn't mind that so I've inserted some text in here and what I could do is here I could say hey this is a heading I could emphasize the text accent I could add bullets numbers I could insert a link and over here I have two options to set the emphasis so here I could set subtle emphasis or here I could set moderate emphasis the main difference is if I go with moderate it makes my text a little larger if I do that with an image or a video it also makes sure that it appears more prominently in my sway so for this I'm satisfied with moderate now what I want to do next let me click on the plus again and I'm gonna insert let's say an image and here to what I'm going to do is I'm simply gonna drag and drop an image to upload it and maybe I'm gonna insert some text alongside my image and this image is going to be and you'll see in a moment it's a picture of me next to a gimbal and what a gimbal allows you to do is you can get stabilized video using it and so here it is and once again I can click on focus points and here you'll see on the larger screen my head is cut off so I'm gonna click on my head and maybe I'm gonna click on the camera as well just to ensure that both of those are shown within the image and I'm satisfied with this so I'm gonna close it out I'm gonna click on the plus again and let me add a heading now and within the heading maybe I want to call this how I ended up at Microsoft and instead of up instead of uploading my own photo what I want to do is I'm simply gonna click on background and here I'll show how you could search for a photo so I'll search for Microsoft and I should get a whole bunch of selections back a number of these have the old Microsoft logo this one is the new Microsoft logo so I'll select that and add it I can also go through and select multiple images if I wanted to do that but in this case I'm going to go ahead and add that and that image will be now associated with this text so the next thing I want to do is part of this heading maybe for this header how I ended up with Microsoft it might be nice to have a video go along with that so I'm going to click at the base and I'm going to go to Media Video and then here what I can do is if I click on this drop-down I could insert let's say a YouTube video and so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna search for my name and I recently did a video on how I got a job at Microsoft's all search for Kevin Stafford job and here it's the first video that pops up and I could add that in and maybe I even put a caption in here as well and here too what I could do is I could set the emphasis and so maybe here I'm gonna I'm gonna put down intense emphasis so takes up a large portion of the screen lastly I'm gonna add one more heading again I'm gonna click on the plus icon and I'm gonna click on heading and here for this one I'm gonna call this photos so let me click into the text area we're gonna call this photos and what I'm gonna do next is let's insert some text to go along with this so I'm gonna click on plus let's insert some more text so here's some photos of me when I was trying to land on a new photo for YouTube many things to Tara Browne for all of these amazing photos there's a link to her YouTube page in the description and so what I could do now is I'm going to click on plus and I want to show what it looks like when I insert groups of content so I'm gonna click on groups and I'll go with automatic to see how that turns out so here too for automatic what I can do is I'm going to highlight a bunch of photos on my PC and I'll simply drag them over to add the content and this will upload them to sway all of my images have finished uploading and here I see them within this category or this group and so one of the things that you'll see is within sway I have all these different headings and the headings serve as a container for the content so here I could both expand and collapse the different headings now one thing that's very nice about sway is just like the name implies storyline I can move content around my page so here I could simply drag and drop if let's say I want to put this how I ended up with Microsoft after my photos or I could drag and drop it above and similarly I can also move the content within around as I see fit so it's very easy to move your content around and get it in a flow that makes sense I have all of my content in my sway now and what I want to do next is let's see what the design looks like and to do that go up on top like we started with and I'm gonna jump into the design view Here I am in the design view and here you see a sample of what this looks like so here I could scroll down and I could see what my content looks like so it looks pretty nice it actually came out very nicely here you see how swea grouped all the photos together I'm actually pretty satisfied with this this looks good but if I did want to modify my sway I can do that and over here in the top right hand corner I can click on styles when I click on styles I could adjust whether it's a vertical layout a horizontal layout or a slide layout so let's see what this looks like by default it's in this vertical layout I could switch it to horizontal and rather than going up and down like horizontal implies I could go side to side or left to right and I can also view it in a slide format similar to PowerPoint where I could jump through from slide to slide I like the vertical format so I'm gonna go back to that down here I can also customize my sway with custom colors typography and textures I'll click into that and show you what this looks like so here I could set the colors I like I could define the colors I like I can even pick colors from my photo if I wanted to do that I see different color palettes fonts and then I could set how I want to emphasize animations and the text size I'm gonna leave them as they are but I do I just want to show some of the controls and capabilities that you have within sway and down here at the bottom this is where I see the course styles of sway so here I could simply click on one of these styles and apply it to my sway when I seve say 7 core styles each row is one of the core styles so I have seven rows here and then you see slight variations across each style so I'm gonna jump back I actually liked the the original one that was set I thought this style looked very good but one thing I can also do is I could go through and I can customize to my heart's content or I could simply try my luck by having sway remix it on my behalf so I'm gonna click on remix and let's see what happens click on remix again and then sway will simply go ahead and try different color and design combinations but I liked what I had originally so all undo it and go back to I had the nice thing with in sway is you can experiment and you can see if you find a design or look that you like now the one thing I love about sway is it's so easy to come up with nice designs all you need to do is get your content in and then sway will take care of making sure that you have a design that looks amazing I'm gonna close out the styles because I'm satisfied with the style that appears here and I want to show a few of the different options that you have here and here in the bottom right hand corner I see this icon this allows me to navigate throughout my sway and here each one of the headings corresponds with a chapter so if I click here this will navigate to that section in my sway so I can very quickly navigate around up here in the top right hand corner I can play this way and by playing the sway this is what this way will look like to different visitors who I share the link with so here if let's say I share this with someone they can scroll through and they'll see what this way looks like so here you see the different animations where the video pops up or here my photos fly in so you get a sense of how the suede looks and what the different animations look like to get back to the Edit view I'm going to click on edit up here and what good would it be to create a sway if I didn't share it with others and right up here in the top right hand corner I have the ability to share my sway and if I click on that I could copy a link so people could view it let's say I want to bring people in and let them edit in I can also let them edit it I've included a link to this way in the description if you want to see what it looks like on your device I could even create a visual link and here's what that looks like it has more of a thumbnail view with the top heading and I could copy this and paste that let's say into an email message if I go back to share I can also share on Facebook Twitter Linkedin I can even get an embed code if I want to say put it on a website and lastly if I click on the ellipses over here in the top right hand corner I could go back to my sways I could create new I could even duplicate this way if let's say I want to start another sway using this as a base and then I have a few other settings as I look down here one of the things that's nice about sway is the sway works very well on different screen sizes so here I'm back in the views way in the play mode here if I take my browser window and I adjust the width of the window here you'll see that regardless of my window size the suede looks very nice so even on a phone display it's gonna be a very nice view these are the core capabilities of sway what I want to show is not only can you create sway from the sway homepage but here if I jump over into Microsoft Word and I go to file there's a new option within the file menu called transform and what I can do is let's say I have an existing Word document I could very quickly transform it into a web page and I could choose the style essentially what this is doing is this is taking your word document and converting it into a sway now that I've worked on my sway what's happened is I'm back here on the sway home page and here I see this way that I just created shows up under the edited pivot what's nice about sway is as I'm working on it all of it is just automatically saved I don't have to go to file save or save as it's simply created in the cloud and every single edit is automatically saved for me and to get back to my sway all I need to do is click on it here all right well that was a quick example of how you could both get and then also use Microsoft's way to create some stunning and beautiful interactive web pages if you found this video helpful and you now know how to create your very own sway please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see future videos like this hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification any time new content like this comes out and lastly if there are any other topics that you want to see me cover in the future or leave a comment down below and I'll add it to my list of videos to create alright well that's all I had for you today and I hope to see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 770,253

Rating: 4.9174914 out of 5

Keywords: kevin stratvert, sway, microsoft sway, interactive, web page, web, page, presentation, communication, newsletter, storyline, storytelling, share, play, microsoft 365, office.com, office, microsoft 360, 360, 365, microsoft office, edit, create, design, photo, photos, video, card, cards, content, background, web site, images, text, image, story, tutorial, help, guide, how to

Id: OrYYQvPilSk

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020