I’ve recently fallen in love with Microsoft Office Sway. Sway is a free presentation tool available to anyone with a Microsoft ID where users are able to make dynamic, responsive and stunning presentations. I know what you are thinking… isn’t this just a fancy PowerPoint? Not quite.

Sway takes the responsive web as a design framework to help create stories in a visually appealing way, similar to building a website using Bootstrap.

For this exercise, I tried to imagine myself as a marketer part of a team who manages their meetings in different formats: tv screens, paper, tablets, phones and laptops. With Sway, I was able to build a social media analytics report that was pleasant to look at, structured around a top-down narrative about the data.

I decided I wanted to focus on looking at the Star Wars Facebook page right before the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. After gathering data through Crowdbabble, I built a Sway presentation to share a quick story about my insights.

I used Crowdbabble’s export image feature and built a presentation deck that is shareable across all devices. Sway has a built in export feature so users can share the presentation link via any social channel or email. Anyone is able to watch the presentation with the link, much like accessing Dropbox files: https://sway.com/3iMWcnRQYdKcNGP1

I’ve tested the Sway deck on smartphones, tablets and laptops. The design is 100% responsive and adapts to any screensize.

Here is the report. Sway also allows you to embed your presentations. Take a look! It works like a PowerPoint on that you are also able to interact with the images by making them bigger to focus your points. Below, the data for the official Star Wars’ Twitter and Facebook pages ahead of the big release.

On the first slide, you can see that Star Wars’ performance on Twitter has been high: more than 1,400 favourites, replies, or retweets per tweet. On the franchise’s Facebook page, 100% of posts are liked 100+ times. Conversation depth on Facebook is also healthy. Only one post, on December 2, fell way below the page’s average engagement with very few stories created. On Facebook and Twitter, the franchise is racing full speed ahead towards a huge opening and its fans are excited to come along for the ride. As I said before, with Sway these stats are legible on any screen size.

If only we can integrate Sway into Crowdbabble to have real time data presentations! Hopefully they will release their API in the near future. Microsoft built a truly unique, web based presentation platform that has a bright future in the new 21st century office and Crowdbabble loves it!

Lucasfilm