Office Sway Now Supports Co-Authoring

Office Sway just got a major update and now offers real-time editing and collaboration. This will allow students, co-workers and family members to work together on sways, much as they can on documents with traditional Office applications.

If you’re not familiar with Office Sway, be sure to check out Mixing and Swaying with the Latest Office Offerings. Basically, Sway is a new type of Office app, one that lives in the cloud and creates only cloud-hosted sways, which are themselves a new kind of live and interactive web app that automatically adapts to whatever device you’re using at the time.

Sway has been updated many times since its initial release, as you might expect of a new cloud-based solution. But until now, it’s been a tool for individual authors, with no co-authoring functionality.

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With today’s update, that’s changed.

“It’s easy to create and edit Sways with other people,” the Sway team writes in a post announcing this new functionality. “Simply share an edit link with anyone you’d like to work with. When your family, friends, classmates or colleagues click the link and log in, your Sway will show up on their ‘My Sways’ page, too (with an icon indicating it’s a shared Sway to help you all stay organized). They can edit the Sway just as you can—and at the same exact time as well. As always with Sway, your work is saved automatically as you go along.”

To get started with co-authoring, open a new or existing sway at Sway.com and click Share in the upper-right corner.

share

From that drop-down, select the “Add a New Author” icon (the one that looks like a Weeble with a plus sign on it) to generate an edit link (URL) that you can copy and paste and share with your co-author(s).

Sway co-authoring works much like it does in traditional Office applications, Microsoft says. You can see where others are making edits, and you can always bring up a list of contributors, whether they’re currently editing or not. And yes, the original editor of a sway can revoke editing privileges from others at any time.

Microsoft has also provided the ability to create a copy of a sway. This can come in handy in a number of scenarios: perhaps you need to use the same template for a different sway, create multiple versions of a sway for different reasons, or want to co-author a sway but would like to leave the original untouched. To copy a sway, click the More (“…”) item in the top right and then choose “Duplicate this Sway” from the drop-down menu that appears.

duplicate

Pretty cool.

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