Dashboard > Help > Documents

Documents

There are some challenges with including documents in your app so that they are easily viewed on digital signage, on a mobile device, or with a web browser, but they are easily resolved.

Most PDF files are impractical to view on a phone as they are generally designed for a letter-size page, and on a small screen the user will have to swipe to scroll horizontally as they read each line. Therefore, we do not recommend uploading PDF files to the app or even putting them on your website.

Microsoft Word files (.DOC or .DOCX files) are even more problematic! Most web browsers do not support these directly; instead, the user must have an app or program installed that is capable of viewing them. Typically, if they are able to view the file, it may open (slowly) in an editing app.

If you use Microsoft Publisher, well, mobile devices generally cannot open Publisher files.

What's the solution? We recommend using "copy and paste" to copy your documents into the App Dashboard's Editor. This will make them work with all devices, and paragraph text will reflow automatically to fit the size of each user's screen. Also, pages will load much faster!

It is a good idea to split up large documents into multiple screens in the app. Read more on the Student Handbook page.

There are three ways to include documents in the app:

Editor

If the content already exists in a document, it is recommended that you copy and paste content into the Editor. Then, review and fix any formatting issues.

For more information, instructions, and tips read the Editor guide.

Upload

You can upload images, PDF documents, and MP4 videos. PDF documents are discouraged as they will likely not be formatted for the screen size. Note that if you have an Office document, you can take a screenshot to convert it to an image.

Here is the full list of allowed file types:

.pdf, .txt, .jpg, .jpeg, .svg, .bmp, .png, .gif, .webp, .3gp, .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mp3, .mkv, .ogv, .ogm, .ogg, .oga, .webm, .zip

However, please do not upload large video or audio files. You can host media elsewhere and use the External URL option for that.

External URL (web link)

This option is typically used for linking to YouTube or other online content.

Note that we do not currently recommend linking to Google Docs.

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