When I first saw the announcement about Office Sway last week, I thought – well, you can probably guess what I thought. Does it have any potential for BI? After all, the Sway team are clearly targeting business users (as well as hipster designers and schoolchildren): look at the Northwest Aquarium and Smith Fashion Expansion samples, and notice that they contain tables, charts and infographics. What’s more, data storytelling is currently a very hot concept and Sway is clearly all about telling stories. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could have interactive PivotTables, PivotCharts and Power View reports from your Power BI site embedded in a Sway? It would be a much more engaging way of presenting data than yet another PowerPoint deck.

I have no idea whether any integration between Sway and Power BI is actually planned (I have learned not to get my hopes up about this type of thing), but even if it isn’t maybe someone at Microsoft will read this post and think about the possibilities… And isn’t this kind of collaboration between different teams supposedly one of the advantages Microsoft has over its competitors in the BI space?

PS I want a pink octopus costume just like the one that girl in the video has