Microsoft Wants Your Words To Have
Some Sway
Introduction to Microsoft Sway
Microsoft Sway represents another way in which Microsoft is bringing its AI image generation technology to Consumers who have a Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) subscription. Sway will build a web page for you from your text. It has its own website at the Office.com website. If you are logged onto your Microsoft account who will be redirected to sway.office.com.my. Here your Sway pages are stored. There are, also, templates on which to build new Sway pages.
Yada. Yada. Yada.
What I think will be of
keen interest to many Consumers, is the integration of Sway into MS
Word. There has always been a
feature in Word to save a Word
Document as a webpage. There are a few problems of this approach
to Consumers. First of all, some knowledge of HTML is not
required, but does help. Although, a webpages can be standalone
documents, unless the page is strictly text, the elements of a webpage
must be hosted on some webserver somewhere. None of this is
necessary for a complex Word
document to made into a Sway webpage.
To generate a webpage from a Word doc, with your doc open in Word, click File and scroll down to the Transform button. For the purpose of this demo, I copied and pasted the just the text from the Windows Version 23H2 page on the Dispatches. The only edition was to recreate the hyperlinks in the original webpage.
If you do not see the Transform feature added to the Word File menu, then I suggest you visit the Cheatsheet on updating Office.
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When you click the
Transform button, the Transform Menu
will open. |
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| After you click
Transform button, you will reminded of the user's Microsoft account where the Sway page will be stored; and you are given the opportunity to sign in or save to a different account. If all is AOK, then click the Transform button. ↓ |
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| When click
Transform, your Sway Page will be generated, and you will be redirected to Sway Page at office.com. ↓ |
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| The first page
that will be displayed is called the Text Card.
The Text Card is where you can make edits to the text that will make up your Sway Page. ↓ |
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|
And here is the Sway Page generated
from my Word Document1 using the Celestial template. The complete page can seen here. Click Storyline to view the text only. Click Design to view the Sway Page. ↓ |
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| The Sway Page as
its own settings icon. Here you can do many different things with your Sway Page. The Print Button will print the text of the Sway Page as a PDF File. ↓ |
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| The Share
Button will generate an URL for Your Sway Page to Send to
Friends and Family. Select whether your recipients can simply view the page or make edits. Click the Universal Copy button. Paste that into an email. And Spread Your Sway. ↓ |
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It is my opinion that making and sharing web pages is one of the more fun things that are still left for adults to do in computing. Where Sway technology might be most useful to Consumers is if a Consumer has email lists. Simply send the URL to your Sway page, and amaze and astound your friends and family.
Personally, I am not a big fan of preformatted webpages. I began editing HTML using Notepad too many years ago. So, for me, creating HTML pages isn't really an effort. What Microsoft Sway offers Consumers is decades of technical know how distilled into a just a few mouse clicks.
So write up a Word doc.
Format it however you want. Add pictures and hyperlinks. And then Click
File → Transform to transform your boring Word document into a dazzling
Sway Web Page. And give it to the world via the World Wide Web.
We
feel the room swayin'
While the band's playin'
One of your old favorite songs from way back
when
—
Hello, Dolly, Louis Armstrong
Gerald Reiff