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Have a killer idea?

Microsoft wants to make it easy to turn it into a presentation. The company unveiled a new product called Office Sway today that provides users with a canvas to document their ideas and then go on to share them with other people.

It’s a free, web-based app that Microsoft says will work on mobile devices (through a native app) and desktop browsers. Users get started by creating a title for their project, and can then add text, images and video to it. Here’s a video that shows how it all works:

Once users have finished their creation, they’ll be able to share it as a link through email, or on a social network of their choice. Microsoft said that it plans to allow people to embed their Sway creations on the web in the future, but that isn’t available right now.

It’s a tool that seems tailor-made for people who want to go quickly from concepts to showing off their ideas. People who are interested in just taking notes would probably be better suited to a tool like OneNote, and people who need hardcore presentation-authoring tools would probably still prefer PowerPoint. But the final product people get out of Sway is designed to work well in more casual situations where people need to show off ideas but don’t necessarily want to double their work by taking notes and building a presentation.

Sway’s design puts Microsoft in closer competition with Evernote, which began allowing users to quickly turn their notes into presentations earlier this year.

In addition, the presentation component of Sway encroaches on the territory of Haiku Deck and Jackson Fish Market’s Slide Bureau app, which are both designed to take user information and make it easy for them to build a presentation.

Right now, Sway is in an invite-only preview. People interested in signing up can visit Sway.com and get their email on the list.

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