Microsoft Sway Gets Many New Features: Interactive Charts, Image Focus Points, Accent, Document Embeds And More

Microsoft today delivered a major update to its Sway service on the web. Find the new features in this release below,

• They’re rolling out support for creating interactive charts right within Sway.  With the addition of native charts, it’s easy to add a variety of interactive data visualizations to enhance your Sways—including column, stacked column, bar, stacked bar, line, pie, donut pie, area, stacked area and bar charts with people icons.
• 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.
• Now we’ve added Accent—an additional way to differentiate content in your Sway. Accent allows you to express your intent by telling Sway to be more subtle. With Accent, you can make a piece of content look different from its surroundings, while retaining the same visual impact level and layout. So changes to accented content are more refined, such as italics, soft glows, drop shadows, or saturation. At the moment, Accent can only be applied to text, and its effect in all styles will be italic formatting, but longer term Accent will be available for all content types and may apply different subtle changes depending on the style.

Read more about it here.