Microsoft's new Sway app: Office isn't copying paper documents any more

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Introduction

When you create a Word document, you're making something that's really a digital piece of paper. Indeed, in Word 2013 you can't even turn off the fake piece of paper shown for each page without switching into web layout view. PowerPoint presentations are aping fancy overhead projectors and whiteboards, down to the fake pen you scribble on them with. OneNote is the engineering notebook, down to the ruled lines for writing on if you want to see them.

None of those are bad things – they're familiar ways of working and if you're writing an essay or putting together a set of charts and bullet points to talk about in a meeting, the document metaphors do still make some sense.

But that's all a long chalk from the way we swipe through photos on a phone when we're showing them to friends, or catch up with social media in an app like Flipboard. If you settle down to enjoy a long article in a magazine, it's just as likely to be on a tablet or a website as on paper, with big background images that change as you scroll and interactive visualisations you can play with, using responsive design that adapts to the device you're using.

Wouldn't your next company report be more impressive presented like that? So far, creating those has meant hand-coding a lot of CSS or finding the budget for a web designer, app developer or both.

Sway's a new way

Sway is a new Microsoft Office app (and web service) that aims to make it easy to create what Microsoft's David Alexander calls stories rather than web pages. "You can create and view Sways in a browser, but Sway doesn't just make websites. Sway is an immersive and interactive canvas for sharing ideas, that is digital."

What you're making could be a presentation or a report, a catalogue or an essay, a quiz or even a 'choose your own adventure' story, pulling content from your phone's camera roll or from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or a map site as well as text you type in (or dictate using your phone's voice recognition).

Think responsive design like the New York Times' famous Snow Fall story meets Flipboard. Think DTP for modern web pages – think HyperCard, if you remember Apple's digital stack of connected cards. None of them are exactly what a Sway is, but you can make something rather like any of them in Sway.

Anything you can put on a computer is digital, but Alexander insists that Sway is digital in a different way (and he's not keen on comparisons to things Sway is like). "We didn't try to emulate an analogue form of content. We didn't say 'we're a document so we should be modelling a piece of paper'. We're not trying to emulate a slide presentation on a flip chart so we have to have slides in a certain way. Given the digital age, the very web-oriented age we live in, the best type of content doesn't have to have a parallel in the analogue world. It doesn't have to be similar to any other thing and it can be optimised for the web."

More layouts incoming

The layouts you see in Sway today are simple horizontal and vertical layouts, but more are coming (probably around nine) with different ways of arranging content. "The traditional presentation or report is very linear," Alexander points out. "By being very digitally authentic and web-oriented we can make new forms of storytelling that don't have to be linear."

But the really interesting thing is that you don't start by picking the layout you want. "We're taking the traditional content authoring model and flipping it on its head. It used to be you start with a blank page and you specify parameters, you specify how things fit exactly on an XY axis. Here you pick the content and Sway will go off and build the output for you and then you can tweak it as opposed to you having to build it from the ground up."

Artificially intelligent design

Alexander calls Sway a "digital design assistant" using machine learning to work out how best to present your content. You can leave Sway to pick a colour scheme or point it at a photo you like and tell it to extract the palette from that. The idea is to get you something that looks polished and professional quickly enough to keep up with a Twitter-speed world.

"The cycle of creating content is getting shorter," Alexander points out. "If you think about social apps like Instagram it's about 'right when you have the ideas, get something great out to your network'. Share your ideas right when they happen. Don't wait to capture them and then plug it into another device and then do something a month later. I know if I don't create the Facebook album when I'm on vacation, right when it's happening or the day I get back, I will probably never do it. I didn't get to it right when I was doing it and then I moved on.

"The instant gratification notion of social media is trickling down into the way we do other things in our lives, including the way we create content. At the same time the amount of time and attention people have for mastering all the skills of any one app is going down. People want to be able to create something compelling fast. I can hand it over to the digital design assistant and have it create something amazing for me – to tweak if I want – and then get it right out there."

Not just static

The content you put in Sway doesn't have to be static – it can be a feed that updates. "Why would you have just a monthly business report or just a quarterly business report or an annual business report?" asks Alexander. "Why wouldn't you just have the business report which is the status of the business at any given time? The data that's telling the story for the state of your business is updating all the time, and more and more people want a snapshot of the content they're using to tell their stories."

And as the content changes, especially if you add more content or change the way it's linked together, the way your Sway is laid out might change. What you have isn't a file saved in the cloud.

"The Sway is kind of like a skeleton where it goes and makes a phone call to get the organs," Alexander says, rather gruesomely. "Sway continues to adapt – it will choose the optimal output and layout based on the content you're adding, based on the change you're making, based on the changes to the structural relationship between the different pieces of content you've added."

And given that it's based on machine learning, Sway will learn more about presenting information so it might start suggesting new kinds of layout in the future.

Early days

With just an iOS app and a website and a few layouts, Sway is very much in preview. Like Windows 10, it's something Microsoft is showing off long before it has finished learning about what people want. Alexander claims the team will "obsess about feedback – it's not done and we're proud of the fact it's not done because we're working on it together with our users."

Sway is a very different way of working, but it doesn't mean the rest of Office is going away. Word and Excel and PowerPoint are far from dead; in fact they're just arriving on Android and iPhone. Traditional Office documents will carry on being made in their millions.

But like the other less traditional Office tools – OneNote for collecting information from web pages, tweets, PDFs and so forth, Office Lens for turning whiteboards and scribbled-on napkins into documents, Mix for turning PowerPoints into interactive lessons, PowerQuery for grabbing information from online data sources to work on in Excel, and PowerMap for laying your Excel information out as interactive maps – these show that Microsoft isn't relying on what Office used to be for PCs and Macs. It's trying very hard to make the suite fit into the web, smartphone and tablet world.