Microsoft has taken to the Office Blog to announce a new update for Sway. The tool for making presentations has scored several new features with the release. With this update, users receive new abilities such as closed caption, audio recording, navigation view, and autoplay. Microsoft says it based the features on customer feedback.
Sway is a digital storytelling publishing tool that helps users create design with simple tools. These designs are considered to be semi-professional. The company says the relationship between users and developers is a partnership. By requesting feedback on Sway, the company has been able to create features based on what people want.
Audio recording is one of the new features. Adding audio to Sways has been a top request, especially from educators. Microsoft says by adding the feature, users can express their ideas more intuitively. Audo recording brings an added level of interactivity to the platform.
In its blog, the Office team says audio recording is only supported in some web browsers. These are Microsoft Edge and Chrome.
Joining the list of Sway abilities is closed caption. This addition brings more accessibility to customers, allowing them to create close caption files for their Sways. Closed captions can be associated audio files from OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.
Navigation view makes it significantly easier to move between sections of a Sway. This gives users a smoother fast look at their content across a presentation. A new navigation icon opens this view, showing the title, section headers, images, and text. These individual components can be selected to find desired content or to just get an overview.
Autoplay and View Count in Sway
Another much requested feature has been the ability to play and loop Sways. Users with an Office 365 subscription can do just that with an autoplay feature. It is worth noting that only the author can set this feature, but any reader of the Sway can make it autoplay for them.
Customization of autoplay is also available, such as the ability to delay, pause or stop playback.
The final new addition to Sway this month is a simple view count capability. This lets Sway authors keep track of how well their content is engaging with readers. View count has actually been operational since last month, but is getting an official launch this month.
