News

Microsoft Adds OneNote Integration to 'Sway' Office App

• By Gladys Rama
• March 04, 2015

Microsoft this week updated its Office "Sway" app to include more privacy options and integration with the Microsoft OneNote note-taking tool.

First launched as a limited preview in October, Sway lets users put together interactive presentations -- which Microsoft calls "Sways" -- from media saved on their devices' local hard drives, OneDrive cloud storage accounts or social networks. They can also pull in media -- including images, video and audio clips, maps and documents -- from the Web. Finished Sways can then be shared on social media or via e-mail as a link.

On Tuesday, Microsoft said Sway users can now add images saved in the OneNote note-taking application to their presentations. Users can choose from their most recently saved OneNote images, or they can navigate to their OneNote notebooks and choose images from there.

"[W]ith the recent integration of OneNote, you can easily add images to your Sways from your OneNote notebooks saved on OneDrive," the Microsoft Sway team said in a blog post. "Simply select OneNote from the drop-down on the Insert tab, navigate to your desired images and drag and drop them into the Storyline."

Microsoft is also inviting feedback from users regarding what other types of OneNote media they would like to include in their Sway presentations.

"[T]his is just the first version of OneNote integration in Sway. Before we add more functionality, as part of Sway Preview, we want to make sure we understand which additional capabilities you would like to see from OneNote integration. We've added a short two-question survey directly in the OneNote section of the Insert tab," the blog said.

In addition to the OneNote integration, Microsoft also added more options for users who want to control the visibility of their finished Sway presentations. There are now three ways users can choose to share their presentations: "Public" means the Sway can be found by anyone performing a Web search, "People with the link" means that only people who are provided a link to the Sway can view it, and "Just me" means the Sway can be viewed only by people who have the creator's log-in information.

Other improvements announced on Tuesday include:

• Expanded support for Web multimedia. Users can now include media from Office Mix, Infogr.am and Mixcloud into their Sway presentations, as well as embed existing Sways.
• Improvements to the Sway search function. "Suggested" search results now include Tweets and YouTube videos.
• More photo layout options will be added "over the next few days."

The Sway preview became available to the general public in December. So far, Microsoft has not said when the final version will be released.