This article is more than 1 year old

Sway: Microsoft's new Office app doesn't have an Undo function

Content aggregation, meet the workplace ... oh

The Sway magic - or frustration

The magic happens when you preview your Sway. This is not a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tool; you only discover what the Sway will look like when you click on the right to see the output. Sway's algorithms then reformat the content according to what lead engineer Chris Pratley says is an "expert system of design."

Sway will layout your content, optimized for the device on which it is being viewed. You can tweak the design by selecting from a few high-level options, currently limited to structure (flow vertically or horizontally), style (typography and transitions) and colour scheme.

Stacked images in a Sway

If you choose a horizontal layout, you get forward and back buttons, with results influenced by Microsoft's "Metro" style. This means you get text or images chopped off in the middle by design, the idea being that this tells the reader to expect more content to follow.

Once completed, you can publish your Sway either to social media, or by getting a link, or by embedding it in a site or blog of your own.

​What, then, is Sway for? One observation is that it is more about content aggregation than content creation. You do some research, for example, and want to point colleagues to a couple of web links, a few tweets, and a YouTube video: Sway could pull it all together.

This will make more sense in the context of Office 365, with internal as well as external content, and Microsoft is muttering about features like integration with Delve (a search tool for Office 365 content) and "capabilities for information protection and IT management." Then again, SharePoint, along with many other tools, already supports wikis and blogs; is Sway adding much value?

Another issue is the limited set of cloud assets on offer. Why is there no link to Bing or Google image search? What about inserting a map? How about an Excel chart, near essential for business use?

Unfortunately Sway in its current preview is hardly usable. There is no undo or document history, and it is easy to lose work or mess up your document with no way back; auto-save can work against you. The tools and card types are too limited. You cannot crop images, for example, so if you have a bunch of photos in your OneDrive camera roll you have to take them as-is or use an intermediate tool, losing the benefit of Sway's integration.

Sway also lacks basic features like tables, and the tables and graphs shown in Microsoft's examples turn out to be bitmaps created with other tools.

Sway's automated designer is annoying because you cannot fine-tune the results, but only make wholesale changes to the style.

Neither businesses nor consumers are clamouring for new ways to "express themselves" online, so Sway, it seems to me, is in the category of bright ideas that might or might not find a market. The concept of documents that magically lay themselves out as things of beauty is, well, magical, but it does not work in the preview – and might not ever work. Microsoft wants to get away from the traditional idea of using a template and then tweaking the results, but Sway goes too far in removing the user's ability to format their document.

Microsoft is accused of not innovating enough but sometimes it innovates too much, losing touch with its users; examples include Windows 8 and even perhaps Xbox One with Kinect, when users just wanted fast graphics and cool games.

Sway is an example of the company trying something new in cloud documents, but it will need more concessions to traditional ways of working before it can succeed.®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like