Printing a Microsoft Sway

Microsoft released a beautiful presentation creator for the web called Sway.  You can author responsive presentations with a modern feel using their online editor, available for free at Sway.com.  You can view these on any browser from anywhere, since they are hosted online.  But, when you are giving a talk, it is handy to have a print-off of your slides.

Sways do not have the ability to print.  I don't know if this is intentional, or if this is a side effect of the way the sways can be dynamically rendered in the browser.




The first important step is to switch the sway into Accessibility View mode.

I gave my OneNote Clipper extension a try.  It has the ability to snapshot a complete webpage.  This was unsuccessful as it only captured the first page of the sway.




I read about a free screen capture utility that could capture scrollable windows called PicPick.  This sounded like it would do exactly what I needed it to.  And it did.  Install the utility, choose to capture a scrollable window, click in the browser window hosting your Sway in Accessibility View, and voilà.

The output of PicPick was a really long PNG of the Sway.  Next, I opened up the image in MSPaint and chose Print Preview.  I set my orientation to Portrait.  Centering Horizontal.  Finally, I played around with the pages... and finally selecting Fit to: 1 by 22.  I settled on 22 since the preview image on the left showed the gray area representing my image almost touching the border hashmarks.  When I set it to 23, it overlapped the borders.

I hope this helps someone else out there, until Microsoft builds this functionality into the tool.  There has been a UserVoice request for this feature since Oct. 2014.