cgs-sway

Using Office Sway (2016)

Getting Started Now you may be thinking, Sway? Is that some sort of a dance? No, it's actually a design application that helps you tell an engaging story. You can use this for a presentation, a business guide book, maybe a travel journal, or a school report. In this clip, we will take a tour of the many navigation features. Let's first start by finding the Sway app. After logging into Office 365, there are two ways that you can launch this: from the Collaborate With Office Online, which is the live tiles that you see towards the bottom of the home page. Let's go ahead and scroll down and take a look for the Sway app. Here, we can see the icon for this. We can either click here to launch the app or, if we go to the upper-left corner where the App Launcher is, this will also display all of the Office 365 applications. So, let's go ahead and launch Sway from here. Now, what you see here is the home page. It also is known as the My Sways page. There are two ways that you can get started with designing a Sway, you can either select Create New in the upper-right corner on the toolbar, or you can select from the tile area just below the title My Sways. So, there's two ways that you can start a Sway. You can start a new Sway from scratch and you'll go ahead and give it a title and add all of those text and media elements, or if you already have some documentation that you'd like to pull those graphics and texts from, you can import supported file types. And the current supported file types as of this recording in May 2016 are Word, PowerPoint, and PDF. Also, within this My Sways area, you'll notice that there are some other tiles that you can work with. This is where you will see previous Sways that you've created. So, once you create something and save it, it will display at the top of this listing of tiles. So, it's going to go in chronological order, displaying to you the most recent Sways that you have worked in, whether that's updating or creating, down to those previous Sways. Also included in here are Sways that other people have created and these were great to click on and take a look at because it'll give you an idea of some of the creative ways that they are designing these Sways. Within this live tile area, you will also notice a three ellipses in the upper-right corner. This is what's known as your more options. So, here you can see that we now have some icons that are displaying over that tile, different ways that we can work with this Sway. If we'd like to play this and it as the audience would be viewing it, we can select the play icon. To share this out with others and those would be colleagues within your company or even externally, maybe to different vendors, students, other audience type members, you'll go to the share area. And if you like the way that this Sway looks, even if it's a Sway that someone else has created, why not duplicate that and customize it to be your own. And finally, we have the trash can. Now, selecting this is going to delete this Sway and it's going to send it to the Recycle Bin. And the Recycle Bin is just above these tiles within the My Sways area. Let's go ahead and take a look at this. Your Recycle Bin is also going to be viewed within a tile format. And here, we can see the background of this Sway as well as the title, when it was created, and when it was deleted. Now, if I'd like to restore this or if I'd like to permanently delete it, the first thing that you'll need to do is select the box in the upper-left corner and then, chose from one of the commands above. I can either restore this back to the My Sways area or I can permanently delete this. If I'd like to clear the selection, so, if I have one, two, 10 tiles selected, I could also clear the selection by selecting here. That simply unchecks the box that we see in the upper right-hand corner. Then go ahead and permanently delete this. It wants to know if I'm sure that I'd like to do that. All right, and now, we have no Sways in the Recycle Bin. Something worth noting here, as well, if you place something in the Recycle Bin, it will stay there for 30 days and then, after that, it's automatically going to be permanently deleted. Now, there's a couple ways that we can get back to the My Sways home page. You'll notice just above we have a bread crumb trail that shows we're in the Recycle Bin and My Sways and if I hover my mouse over this, I do have that pointer indicating that that is a link that I can click on and it will take me back to that area. I could also get to My Sways from the ellipses that we see up here in the upper-right corner. From here, I can go to My Sways. I can also create a new Sway. So, there's a third way that you can create a new Sway. I can give feedback about Sway to Microsoft, what do I like, what would I like to see incorporated. As well as who I'm logged in as and if I'd like to sign out. Let's go back to the My Sways area. And let's go ahead and take a look at one of those existing Sways. After selecting the Sway tile from the My Sways area, you'll notice that it opens this Sway within the same browser window and the view that we're looking at is what's called storyline. This view has different content parts or different content cards that we're working with here. So, the very first content area is going to be the name of this Sway. Here we have an area that we can type a title in. And just above that, some formatting choices that we have on the toolbar, as well as an image that can be incorporated, and that's going to be the image that is going to be the background of this Sway. Now, below this, you can have as many content card areas as you would like and these can be either text or various media files like videos, audio, as well as graphics. These content card can be dragged and dropped and rearranged. They can also be grouped. When you see a group content card, you can use the arrow to expand that group as well as collapse that group. Now, over to the left is the Quick Launch area and this is also known as the Navigation Pane. And this Navigation Pane is going to change contextually, depending on what is selected above from the ribbon toolbar that we see here. So, right now, we are looking at the different cards that we can work with. So, cards is selected, so, in that navigation area, we have different cards that we could drag and drop into this Sway. If I'd like to see the different types of images or other content that's suggested that I may want to use, I can switch this to the insert tabbed ribbon. And, based upon what it sees the content is of this Sway, it's going to suggest some things that I may want to use. So, based upon the text that it sees here, it's suggesting that I may want to use an image of Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison. Maybe something else about electricity. And I can browse these different categories by selecting the suggested drop down. I can actually go out to maybe different resources. So, if I have some images or text in my OneDrive, Flickr, or if I'd like to search Bing as well as YouTube, Twitter, or other sources that I can add, I can choose those from here and refine my results. I can also search sources by typing in a name within this field. Those results are going to display in this same Navigation Pane that we're currently looking at. To close the Insert Pane, I can click the X to the right and give some of that real estate back to really focus in on my content cards and what I'm working in. Now, we've taken a look at the Insert tab and the Cards tab, let's take a look at the Design tab next. The design ribbon gives you the capability to be creative with typography, colors, and textures. Here, we can see many different choices that are pre-formatted for your use and if you'd like to customize it a bit more, you can do that by selecting customize. Now, navigation, it gives you three options in the way that you can move through the content of your Sway. Your content can flow vertically, horizontally, or be optimized for presentation. The current selection that we're looking at here is vertically and here you can see the other choices that you can select. Of course, you can always undo or redo the commands that you've been working with by selecting the arrows just to the right of these tabbed areas. If you'd like to play this and see if in a view as the audience would see it, select the play command over here to the right. To the right of Play is Authors. This is a place where you can see who may also be in here authoring this Sway with you if you have shared it out with others. You may be familiar with this in other Office 365 applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, or the equivalent of these applications in Office 2016 installed in your computer. The authors area will show a listing of who's working in the Sway and it may also indicate where within the Sway they are working. And speaking of share, just to the right of this is another opportunity for you to share this Sway with others. By selecting this, you can determine if you'd like to share that out or just have it privately for yourself to work within and get the embed code if you are using Yammer or something else that will allow you to use embed code. And then, here's like link that you can actually copy and paste into an email, into a Word document, or presentation, maybe even into a Skype For Business chat. And finally, tutorials. This is great supplementary material if you're new to Sway and you want to get a bit more information on exactly how you can use this. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Sway: Create Something New In this clip, you will learn how to create a Sway. We will walk through how to create new from scratch, import from a supported document, and how to duplicate from an existing Sway. We'll get started from the My Sways page. Consider this homepage as this is what displays when you launch Sway from the My Apps area of Office 365. Now there's two places that you can get started with creating a Sway. If you're creating something from scratch, you can either select Create New that you see over to the right on the toolbar at the top, or Create New from the first tile that you see within the My Sways area of this page. We'll go ahead and get started by selecting Create New from the tile area. Now as I mentioned before, this is the method to start a Sway from scratch. There's no content that is already included with this. The view that we're seeing is what's called the Storyline, so we're going to start from the top and then work our way down to add content to this. It does start you with one particular content container, and that's the container that my mouse is currently over, has a background placeholder to the left, and also a place to include a title for the Sway. As you enter information and start designing this Sway, it's going to autosave it for you so no need for you to save updates as they're happening. Let's go ahead and give this Sway a title. Now that we've started creating this new Sway, let's go back to the My Sways page and take a look at where this Sway is now listed and saved. We can do that by selecting the three ellipses that we see in the upper right corner. This gives us more Sway options, and from this menu, we're going to go back to My Sways. Just next to where we selected Create New to start this Sway, we now see a tile titled Conversational Geek Windows 10. Now this is the Sway that we just created, and since we gave it a title, it is showing us that title over the tile for this Sway. If we had started this but not added any content or text to it, it would have a tile placeholder here that would say Untitled with the date that it was created below. From the My Sways page, if we'd like to go back in and continue designing this Sway, just click directly over the tile and it will take you back to that Storyline view. You do have additional options on how you can work with this particular Sway, and that's the ellipses in the upper right corner. These options are to be able to play it as the audience would see it, to share it with others, to duplicate this Sway, and to send it to the Recycle Bin. We'll get into duplicate in just a moment, but first, let's take a look at how we can import an existing supported document to start creating that Sway a little bit quicker. So we'll go ahead and select Import, and then we'll browse out to where the file resides, and open that. Once the import has been completed, we will be back in what's known as the Storyline view that we were just looking at earlier, and you'll see that it's already brought in a lot of the elements that it has found within the PDF that we selected. So the first container that we see here is the title of that PDF. Now this PDF is a book, a digital book, so we're looking at the actual name of the book as the title, which is great because that's also going to be the name of this Sway that it has autosaved already for us. Now just below that, we do see an image, and this is the cover artwork for this particular book, and within this element, we do have an area that we can include a caption for this image, as well as a toolbar above to apply some formatting. If we go ahead and continue to scroll down, we can see additional text containers here, Headings, as well as information about the copyright of this book, when it was published, and then as we get down here a little bit lower, we start to get into more of the body area of this particular document, so different text containers that we can work within. Now we'll get into formatting in a future clip. Right now we're just taking a look at different ways that we can get started with creating a Sway. So let's head back to the My Sways area and take a look at the Sway that we just created here. So we'll do that with the three ellipses we see over to the right of the toolbar, go back to the My Sways page, and now to the right of the Create New and Import area that we've been using, here is the latest Sway that we created by importing a PDF, and just below that is the Sway that we started from scratch, and then beyond that are additional Sways that either you as the author has created, or others that you may work with, other colleagues, or others that have created Sways and made them public are going to be listed. So these are going to be in chronological order from the newest at the top to the farthest back at the bottom. Some of these Sways that you're going to see here, like How to Start a Sway and some of these other ones below, like this Art and Film Institute, are Sways that others have created as I was mentioning before, and you do have ways that you can take the design elements that you like of that Sway and duplicate it and make it your own. So let's take a look at how we can work with that next. So if you find a Sway that you like, using those three ellipses, we can duplicate this. So after you've selected Duplicate, it gives you an opportunity to rename this. So we could rename this something a little bit more meaningful, and select Duplicate. Now this is good for two reasons. You've renamed it something more meaningful that's going to be easier for you to find within the My Sways area, as well as you now have a title within this Sway that you can start working with. Great, we know that it's been successfully created, let's take a look at what we can do with editing this Sway. And here is what this Film Institute Sway looks like that we have now duplicated and given a title of Office 2016 Tips. You'll notice that all of the imagery, as well as the text containers, have been brought into this Storyline view as we've taken a snapshot duplicate, or a copy as you may know it, of that existing Sway. Now we're able to edit all of these areas, so we can easily select text within a particular container and delete that or type right over it, as well as making some of those changes with the design elements of it, so maybe changing the colors of the text and other design elements. But as you scroll through, you'll see that we do have containers that have existing imagery that was part of that Film Institute Sway, as well as the text that goes along with it, so you can change all the containers, no matter what the text or the imagery is within this and make it your own. As well as bringing in all of that content, it also is bringing in any of the design elements. So which way are the movements going to happen as you are transitioning through your Sway, as well as those different theme colors that you may see within the backgrounds or around those particular containers, but again, all can be edited and made your own. This is simply a great way for you to be able to take an existing Sway, the design that you like, and use that as a wireframe or a template to get started with creating your own Sway. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Sway: Grab Attention with Content In this clip you will learn how to add various types of content to your Sway. Including text, images, videos, graphs and tweets. Let's get started with a new Sway, as you can see on my screen here. When you begin a new Sway, you really have one container that you're going to start working with, and that's the container that we see a background placeholder to the left and a title to the right. Before we start inserting different types of content and imagery, let's first get a little more familiar with how the screen is going to change contextually. If we take a look at the ribbon above, we can see that the Cards tab is what's currently selected, and the Navigation pane on the left is displaying all of the different choices that we have for those container content-type cards. We have the Text group, the Media group, and then we have another Group group below that. So the ways that we would like to group these different containers as well as transition through those. Once we make a change to this by selecting an area that we would like to add an image or content to, like we would with this background image, notice that we have now switched from the Cards tabbed ribbon to the Insert tabbed ribbon, and with that, the Navigation pane that we were seeing on the left, has now been updated to show images or different types of content that we can insert into the Sway. Previous to me starting this recording, I had done a search for light bulb, so it is remembering that previous search within the history, and it's suggesting that to me again to see if I'd like to use that as the background for this Sway. Now, I can scroll through and see the different types of images that are available for a light bulb, and if I'd like to make a selection, I can left click, drag and drop that image into the container that we see here. But before I do that, we could change the search by typing a different keyword or phrase within the search area and we also have the capability to change where we are looking for that particular imagery or content. That's with the Suggested drop-down area. So Suggested is what we're currently looking at, and it's picking up some things that Sway thinks we may want to use, and it may be picking that up from various sources. If we want to filter that, and only look for results in one particular area, like a OneDrive for business library, or maybe even search photos on Flickr or Bing or Pickit. Maybe we're actually looking for a video, we may want to look at Youtube, as well as picking up a tweet, something that someone else has tweeted, around the topic that we are talking about. If you don't see the source here that you'd like, you always have the opportunity to add that source and make it available, as well as uploading something locally from your computer. Now let's go ahead and choose one of the light bulbs that are being suggested, and drag and drop that into the container that we have. Now a couple things are happening with this as it makes this part of the Sway. We can see that this is the image that is being used next to the title, and we can also see some similar coloring over here in the preview. If we expand this preview pane out, we can actually see a full-scale image of the background that is being used. Now we don't have a title yet, because we haven't typed one in. Once we do that we will see that title overlay this image, similar to what you may see as a watermark within a document. So let's go ahead and collapse this Preview pane back down by using the arrow at the top. That's going to go ahead and expand back to our storyline, and let's give this a title. Let's take a look at our preview one more time. Great, so here's the background imagery that we are using within the Sway, as well as the title that is no overlapping this. Now Preview is actually showing us this in a view as to how our audience would see it. So it's always great, as you're adding those elements, to take a peak every once in a while and see if it's looking the way that you've envisioned it to. So let's go back to our storyline view. Great, let's create additional content within this Sway. There's a couple ways we can go about doing this. We can actually click the plus sign just below this content card and that's going to give us different types of content that we can select from just below the card we were working on. And as you hover over each of these, the tooltip is going to give you a bit more detail on what exactly it is that you can insert. If you don't see what you'd like here, these three ellipses are going to take you to the Cards view. We can also switch to the Cards view if we'd like to pick content in a different way, by doing that from the ribbon that we see here at the top. So let's go ahead and switch this back over to Cards, and this is just a different way within the Navigation pane of picking the content that you'd like to add. If I'd like to add, let's say maybe a heading just below this, I can drag and drop that, and now we have a new section, that we can add a new background to as well as a heading to the right. So very similar to the title that we were just working with above. Let's including a video below this. So let's go ahead and drag and drop a Video card to this area, and we need to actually go out and find that particular video that we're looking for. For this we can select the Add an Image, we'll get that Suggested area that we were working in before, but instead of Suggested, we're going to actually choose Youtube as our source. It's showing us a listing of different things that match electricity or light bulbs, but instead of light bulbs, since that is still our keyword search, let's update that with a new search. When we find the match that we're looking for, again, we can left click and drag and drop that to the container where we would like it to be positioned. If we go ahead and then expand our Preview window, just as we were looking at the What is Electricity header before, we can actually arrow through and move forward to see the various pieces of the content that we've added. Here's the video that we added, and we do have that play control if we'd actually like to play it and see how that's going to look for our audience. Let's go back to our storyline. Let's add a tweet below this area. We'll go ahead and switch our view. Let's drag a tweet, and of course you can reorder any of these containers, at any time by drag and drop. We'll go ahead and do a search for tweet. Let's change our source from Youtube to Twitter, and let's do a search for a Nikola Tesla quote. Once you find a tweet that you would like to use, drag and drop that to the placeholder for the tweet, and you've now included the quote within your Sway. Let's add another container to this Sway next. We'll use the plus sign. And we'll go to the Cards area, and let's include a chart. Now, if you're familiar with charts within Excel, this works pretty much the same. We will see a preview of this if we were to take a look at it as the audience would see it in just a moment. First we need to actually create the chart, and we're going to do that by selecting the link that says click here, within this container. So this is an interactive chart, and we're working with this directly within the modern browser that we're using. If we'd like to make any changes to this, we're actually going to do that by clicking on the chart, and then using the three areas that we see in the upper right corner to make those modifications. So the first one is our Chart Type. If we'd like to change this maybe from a bar chart to a line-type of a chart or a pie chart, or even maybe a area chart for comparisons, we can do that. Once you make that selection, you're able to see a preview of what that chart would look like. We'll click the arrow to get back to the view of the chart, and here we have two other choices that we can use to customize this. If we'd like to change the data, right now we are looking at particular cities, we can use this data menu to switch the headings that we are toggling between, whether we'd like to toggle between column headers and row headers, as far as the information that we're seeing. Then to be able to type directly into these, you can select the various elements, and you can insert a new column to the left, or to the right, or actually delete the column that you are working with. We'll go ahead and click on the arrow again, just to get back to the other choice that we have, and that is the cog that you see to the right, which is your settings. So from here we can actually change the chart title. Choose if we would like to show the values on that particular graph that we are working with, and if we'd like to show the grid background or not. So these would be toggle on or off, as you can see here by clicking. As well as it gives you the capability to choose your X and Y axes. Great, so let's go back to our storyline view now that we have added a graph, and let's go ahead and give this entire Sway a preview. So right now we are stepping back through each piece of the Sway. If we'd like to go back to the beginning, we would use the restart arrow that we see as the first choice here, and then just use the navigation arrows to go through each part of the Sway. Now, there's more of course that we can add to this Sway, and we'll get into that in a future clip, like changing the theme colors, giving it a little bit more of a polished look, and changing the ways that you're going to transition from one Card or one content container to the next. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Sway: Polish and Publish Your Storyline In this clip, you will learn how to polish your Sway by changing the colors and typography. You will also learn how to share Sway with others and customize the share options. The Sway that we will be customizing is a digital book. Since we'll be customizing the colors, texture, and typography, we'll be working from the design ribbon mostly. Let's go ahead and switch from the cards view to the design ribbon view. From this design navigation pane, we can change many elements. We're going to start with the fonts. And if you look over to the right, we're able to see a partial preview of this particular Sway, and contextually, we'll see the changes as we're applying those. The current font theme that we're using is the thumbnail that you see listed at the top. Somewhat basic, we can see that we have a texturized background, or a type of a paper that this is on, as well as the font style that we're using. Now as we scroll through and take a look at these, and we'll start here from the top and work our way down. The first row that we have is our color inspiration. And we can see that this is currently set to curated. The check in the upper right corner lets you know which one you're currently using. Now curated are going to be the color inspiration choices that come pre-formatted with Microsoft Sway. But if we'd like to use some of the imagery and the colors that the Sway already contains, this is especially helpful if you've built this Sway by importing it from a PDF, a PowerPoint, or some other type of a document that is supported to start your Sway. You may want to do this to have it match that theme, so that everything looks polished and uniform. So by selecting one of the images that is contained within this Sway, you'll notice that our color palettes below have now updated to give us choices that would match with the colors of that particular image. As we go through these color palettes, there may be more than four to see, and the arrow over to the right is a great way for you to see that next design set that is part of that same color palette. And as we make a selection here, we take a look over to the right in that preview area, we can see the update of the font that is now being used for that. Notice the check in the upper right corner, letting us know that that is the current selection that is being applied, as well as the thumbnail that we see up here within the design grouping, letting us know that that is also the current formatting. Now beyond color inspiration and color palettes, if we scroll down, we have some specific font choices. So right now, the color palette that we're working with here is applying colors as well as whatever font is selected, and we can update that from the list that we see within this dropdown arrow under font choices. Let's go ahead and change this to Bodoni. Now Bodoni is going to be the title font, and then the body font is going to be Times New Roman. If we expand our preview, we can see the blue Bodoni font for the title and the Times New Roman for the body area. Great, now let's go back to our storyline view, and let's get back to the design navigation area. For any of the animations that are happening within this Sway, we can also choose to have this as a subtle, moderate, or intense type of an animation by selecting that within the bar. Let's put that back to intense for now. And then our text size. Right now this is the default, which is normal, but if we need to make that a little larger, maybe for the type of device or the audience that will be viewing this, we can resize this. So we're reflowing everything within this Sway based on the text size that's selected here. Let's go ahead and scroll back up to the top of our design palette, and then let's go back to the main design ribbon. Now that was within the customize area that we were just working within, so that's to give additional personality to all of the elements that you are using within design. So we chose our color inspiration, we took a look at the additional styles we could choose from the color palette, we picked individual fonts, and then we also decided, from the same area, the animations that we'd like to apply and the text size. But if we go back to that main design ribbon one more time. If we're not wanting to use some of those custom ones, we can always go through the different styles that we see listed within this gallery. As we hover over these, the tooltip is going to tell you which style it is, and then along that same row are going to be different variations. So variation two, three, four, and to see additional ones again, we would use the arrow. And of course, as we go down one row, this will be style two and the various variations, and style three and beyond. So these are the many styles that you can use for this particular Sway. Other elements that you may want to use that can also give your Sway a more polished look fall within the navigation area. Now, the default way that your Sway is going to transition is going to be from side to side, which is this middle choice. As you make a selection, you can see that it is updating the Sway. I had changed this previous to this recording to you scroll vertically. But we can also have it scroll horizontally or be optimized for a presentation mode. Once selected and once that change has been saved, you're not actually seeing that transition happen within the preview that we're in. We actually need to go through and step through each of these slides to see how that transition is going to be applied. And once we go back to our storyline, and back to navigation, of course we can make more changes to this as needed. And if you'd like to take the work out of it and let Sway go into autopilot of making a full remix of your entire Sway, you can do this by selecting remix from the toolbar above. What this is going to do is Sway is going to go through and it's going to pick layouts that make the most sense for the content that you've chosen. So let's go ahead and give this a try. So we're clicking remix. We're going to see a few things happen here. It's actually changed the color theme, and it's also changed the font, and we can see that it's changed the way that we're transitioning, because now we are transitioning vertically throughout all of the different containers or cards within the Sway. Great. We've made some design changes, we've let Sway remix all of the layout elements of this particular Sway, now we're ready to share this out with others. We're going to do this from the toolbar, just where we were selecting remix, but over to the right. So we're going to select share, and take a look at the options that we have here. Now the default setting, when you're working on a Sway, is that it is already set to share so that others can actually view this and also co-author in this if they need to make changes as well. If while you are designing this, like we have been during this clip, we can turn that off. So now it is only available to the author that has created it and is currently working within this. Notice when you do this that it turns off all of the other share capabilities below. Once we enable that again, we do have the capability to share this out within a Yammer portal, to get the invite code that you can include on any particular website that you'd like, or actually copy the URL, to copy the link that you could share out with others. So control-C, or a right click and copy. We'll copy that to the clipboard of your computer. Below this area, we can choose how we would like to share this. So just to those that are within your organization, to anyone that happens to have this link above, or even make it public. Now the difference with these first two choices and this third choice to make it public is the first two choices do not make it discoverable if you're doing a search on the internet. The third choice will make it discoverable if you're searching something like Bing, Google, or Yahoo. Of course there are a few more options that we can take a look at, and let's go ahead and expand this area. In a previous clip, we talked about being able to duplicate a Sway that you see. If you'd like to make it so that this Sway is not something that is easily copied or duplicated, you can actually untick the box that we see in this more options area. If you'd like to allow viewers to change the navigation and the layout of the Sway, like we were just doing within this clip, you can enable that by having this box ticked. If you don't want them to be able to make any changes to that, go ahead and untick this box. And would you like to include Sway branding within your particular Sway? So if we uncheck that box, you'll notice that any branding that was contained within the design area of this no longer exists. And at any time if you'd like to stop sharing this, you can also stop the sharing with the button at the bottom. Great, now that this Sway is polished and has all of the design elements in place, it's ready to be shared with others. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next clip.