Microsoft Sway gets interactive charts, Accent formatting, and Focus Points

Microsoft announces more updates to its Sway app today. Now it’s easy to fill up presentations with interactive charts as well as files in PowerPoint, Word, and PDF format, the team said in a blog post.

Microsoft is also introducing new Sway features that should give users the capability to make their presentations look exactly how they want. The announcement follows several improvements the company has made to the app in the months since its October debut.

Users can now highlight Focus Points in images to ensure they show up across devices. Here’s how the Sway team explained the feature in the blog post:

By using Focus Points in Sway, it’s easy to tell Sway what to focus on in your image with just a couple of taps or clicks. Whether you’re in the Storyline or the Sway Canvas, tap or click the image and select Focus Points in the toolbar or the buttons that appear. When the Focus Points pane opens, just tap or click on what’s important in your image! You can also move Focus Points around by dragging them, or remove them by tapping or clicking them again. And at the bottom of the pane, you can see a preview of how the resulting crop could look on tablet/PC screens and mobile screens.

Also new is Accent, which can make text stand out, albeit in more subtle ways than the Emphasis feature. Emphasis might set text in bold or put it in a different color while Accent might opt for something like italics or a “soft glow,” according to today’s blog post.

Data jockeys should like the new support for a variety of “native charts” — bar charts, pie graphs, column charts, and so on. You can add data through Sway in addition to changing the way the visualizations look. Check out a preview of the new feature here.