Office 365 Documentation

Sway or PowerPoint: Which Should I Use?

  • Although Sway and PowerPoint are both tools for creating presentations, not all presentations are created equal.
     
  • PowerPoint works best for content that will have a presenter. It can also be used to make simple videos, including screen recordings.
     
  • Sway can be used to create interactive presentations and content that don't need a presenter. Sway works well with both image heavy (like portfolios) and text-heavy content (like reports).

Below is an overview of some key differentiators

  • Layouts
    • PowerPoint
      • PowerPoint presentations can only be created in slideshow format. However, some features and effects can be used to make a presentation seem continuous. For example, you can add transitions and timers to run through presentations automatically.
    • Sway
      • Sway offers three different layout options for how the content is presented: vertical (like scrolling through a webpage), horizontal (continuous scroll sideways), and Slideshow (similar to PowerPoint). You can switch between layouts in the “Design” tab (click “Styles”).
  • Templates
    • PowerPoint
      • There are thousands of templates available for PowerPoint, many available when you open the program. You can also create your own presentation templates.
    • Sway
      • Sway is much more limited in available templates. There are a couple dozen available on the My Sways page. You can also save a Sway as a template. Within Sway, there are few design templates called “Styles.” The word template is almost too strong in this case - these control the overall design only. They work with all of the layout choices and are customizable.
  • Adding Content
    • PowerPoint
      • You can manually add a wide variety of content to the presentation. Content you can add includes (but is not limited to): text, images (you can upload your own or use the Insert Online Pictures feature to search Bing), photo albums, charts and graphs (which you can create from within Powerpoint), audio and video, equations, screen recordings (which you can record from within Powerpoint), and so on.
    • Sway
      • You can upload content (like a Word Document) directly to Sway and let it build the bones of your presentation for you. Sway supports OneDrive, so you can add content you've saved there.
      • You can pull in web content. From within Sway, you can search Bing and pull in content directly from sites like Wikipedia, Youtube, and Flickr.
      • Sway can also suggest content for you based on what you've already added.
  • Sharing
    • PowerPoint
      • PowerPoint presentations are shared by saving your presentations and distributing the file.
    • Sway
      • Note: Microsoft Sway presentations cannot be shared with users outside of LSU Health New Orleans.
      • The "Share" button in the top right hand corner of a Sway can be used to grant edit or read only access to LSUHSC users. External sharing is disabled.
      • You can also export presentations to Word or PDF by clicking the ellipses in the top right corner, and choosing "Export"

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