Supported file types

PowerPoint presentations (.ppt, .pptx, .pps, .ppsx)

Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xlsx, .xlsm)

Word documents (.doc, .docx)

Microsoft Office files will be displayed as a PDF version of the file. The actual file formats can only be opened in the native Office apps. Some features, like animations and links, may not show correctly because of this reason. You can choose to open these documents in another app, or you can convert the documents to PDF before uploading and control the way they are displayed.
For Powerpoint you can find guidelines here. Note that we don’t support macros in Excel files because they are converted to a PDF document in the background.

View our guide for uploading Microsoft Office documents.

Keynote presentations (.key)

Pages documents (.pages)

Numbers spreadsheets (.numbers)

iWork Documents (Keynote, Numbers, Pages) cannot be processed on our platform. This means that you will not see a preview of your document. These documents will open on iPhone and iPad even without installing the iWork apps. On other platforms, these documents will not open.

On our Android, Windows, and Web app, we can't generate a PDF conversion to view the document.

On iOS, you will be able to view iWork documents.

You can choose to open these documents in another app, or you can convert the documents to PDF before uploading and control the way they are displayed. From within Keynote, for example, you can export to HTML, but animations won't be available anymore after the conversion.

The U3D encoding method is not supported for 3D related PDF files.

View the best practices for uploading PDF documents.

We recommend you to convert .txt, .rtf documents to PDF before uploading them to Showpad. This will ensure compatibility on all platforms.

.mp3, .m4a, .wav

Compressed Windows Media Audio files (.wma) are only supported on Windows devices.

.jpg, .jpeg, .png files

.gif files

A GIF can contain a series of images resulting in an animated image.

The .gif file format is supported on the Advanced Experiences, exclusively when uploading a logo in the design tab.

The file size is limited to 4Mb.

.mov, .wmv, .mp4, .m4v, .3gp, .mpg, .mpeg, .avi, .asf, .flv

Video files that use codecs to compress file size, like DivX (AVI), are not supported.

Some video formats are platform specific. A .mov file won't play on an Android device for example.

Check the documentation of your device to see what movie files can be played.

View the best practices for uploading video files.

.zip files are used for uploading web apps or 3D .DAE file assets

View our web apps and HTML content guidelines or the article about how to upload 3D assets for more information about those zip files.

The max file size is 4GB.

You can add urls as an asset in the Content Library. Read more about it in this article.

.dwg, .dxf, .stl, .iges, .step, .stp, .epub, .ibooks, .rvt, SCORM files

These file types will be stored on Showpad like other files, but they will not open natively. They will be opened in an external application that supports these files.
For example .ePub files open with iBooks on the iPad. On an Android device, you'll need to install another app.
ePub files can be easily exported to PDF files and these will work inside Showpad with all detailed navigation, content sharing and per-page tracking features available.
The same goes for Autocad .cad files. They can be shared, but not viewed in Showpad.

SCORM files are only supported if you have Showpad Coach enabled for your organization. SCORM files have to be added as a ZIP file when creating a course.