Articles in this section

See more

Supported file types

Created - Updated

What's in it for you

Showpad supports a wide variety of documents you can make available for your users. Here you can find a list of file types you can upload in the Content Library on Showpad's Online Platform. 
All files types listed below can be displayed within Showpad but cannot be modified. Editing the files requires other apps (like QuickOffice, Pages for iPad, etc.). However, the Showpad app does allow you to open these documents with another app with just a simple tap.

The list of awesomeness

Microsoft Office documents

  • PowerPoint presentations (.ppt, .pptx, .pps, .ppsx)
  • Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xlsx)
  • Word documents (.doc, .docx)
  • View our guide for uploading Microsoft Office documents.

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 Excel files that have macros enabled.

iWork 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.

Adobe PDF documents

Text and rich-text files 

  • .txt, .rtf

Audio files

  • .mp3, .m4a, .wav
  • Audio files with a .wav extension are not supported on iOS, but you can play them on our Web app, Windows, and Android devices.
  • Compressed Windows Media Audio files (.wma) are only supported on Windows devices.

Photos

  • .jpg, .jpeg, .png files

Videos

  • .mov, .wmv, .mp4, .m4v, .3gp, .mpg, .mpeg, .rm, .avi, .asf, .flv, .ogv, .ogg
  • 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.

Web app

Only HTML5 web apps (using Javascript, CSS, HTML, images, ...) are supported. Dynamic programming languages like Ruby, PHP, .NET, etc. require specific server software and will not run in the Showpad app. Flash is not fully supported since it's an older technology and that may result in the pages not displaying as expected. Find more info on how to correctly upload and prepare web apps for Showpad in this article.

Hyperlinks

  • https://www.

Other documents 

  • .dwg, .dxf, .stl, .iges, .step, .epub, .ibooks, .rvt 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.

Related articles