Documents
For supported file formats, see Supported Media Formats
Each page or slide is shown for 10 seconds by default, unless a PowerPoint slide has a timing of its own. You can change the duration of each page on the Slides tab of the media item, see Media Item settings. In a booking, open the item in the playlist and use its Slides tab to set the duration of each page or turn individual pages off. This is not available for Excel files.
To show Word and Excel files, Microsoft Office must be installed on the server and enabled in the settings. PowerPoint files are converted with a built-in converter unless Microsoft PowerPoint is enabled, which gives better results for diagrams and effects. See Using MS Office on the server.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint is very useful to create content that you can use on your screens. Designed specifically for screen presentations, it is very easy to use for both portrait and landscape oriented content.
When uploading a PowerPoint document to Smartsign, it will be automatically converted to images to ensure consistent display across different screens. Slide durations set in the presentation will be used as well. Because the slides are converted to images, animations, transitions and embedded video are not shown.
Word
Word can be useful to publish newsletters or flyers on your screens. All pages in your Word document will be converted to images in Smartsign so you can adjust duration for each of them.
Word documents are generally recommended for portrait screens and it is recommended to check font sizes to make sure it is clearly visible on your screens.
Excel
Excel can be used to show statistics, schedules or other useful data on your screens. As a Excel document can become very big with a lot of cells and columns, it is important that you make sure that the information is readable on your screens. A good way to visualize data from Excel is to use the Power BI data source in a template to show a dashboard or report, see Power BI.
Only one worksheet is shown: the one that was active when the file was last saved. It is split into pages the way it would be printed.
PDF
PDF's are useful in both in print and signage since they embed fonts, ensuring consistent rendering and display across different environments. Each page will be rendered as a separate image, allowing you to adjust duration for each. Google Docs, Sheets and Slides that you add from Google Drive are converted to pages in the same way.
We recommend using PDF's intended for display on screen and not PDF's intended for print. This is because print PDF's have very high resolution in comparison and it is simply wasted on screen.