Use PDFs to provide your users with presentation materials, charts/graphics, forms, or any other informational resources they may need. You can upload these files to a schedule session or custom list item. The video is a quick overview of the upload process. See below for details and information to review before adding PDFs to your guide.
Considerations
- You must save PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, spreadsheets, and any other type of document as a PDF file type.
- PDF files must be under 25 MB each in size to upload.
- We recommend limiting the total number of documents included in the initial download to 20 MB (this refers to using the Include switch when importing).
- Use smallpdf.com, or another PDF compressor, to compress your PDFs.
- If your documents will exceed the 25 MB limit, host your PDF online and use the PDF URL option.
- When hosting PDFs online, please make sure the URL ends in .pdf, e.g. “http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=your_pdf_url_here.pdf”
- Documents hosted on Dropbox do not render correctly on the app due to compatibility issues. We recommend you upload the PDF directly to Guidebook instead, or host the documents elsewhere.
Adding PDFs to your Guide
In Builder, open your guide and click on either the schedule or the custom list where you would like to include a PDF document.
Create a session or list item, save, and close the item. Then click to re-open that session or list item. You will then see the Links tab.
In the Links tab, click the PDF button. Give your document a name, and then, you can either click Select PDF to choose the file from your computer, or you can provide a PDF URL (a web link ending in .pdf) for the file.
If you choose to toggle the Include switch on, the PDF will be accessible even without an internet connection. If you have many PDFs in your guide, this will increase the size of the guide and may reduce the download rate for your attendees as the initial download will be slower. Click Add PDF when you're ready.
If you are having trouble accessing the PDF, confirm that you've linked it using the PDF button, not the URL button. Also, try removing any spaces or special characters from the name of the PDF.
Creating a PDF Document Library
A PDF library may be useful if you have several PDF resources you'd like to include in your guide. For example, you may have parts of a handbook, presentations, or handouts that would be helpful for your users to have access to.
It may make the most sense to link particular items directly to sessions in your guide, for instance, linking a speaker's slides to the session in which they are presenting. However, if there are PDFs that you'd like to include in multiple places in the guide, having a document library allows you to only upload the PDF to the guide once, so can save time.
If it makes the most sense for your use-case to have many PDFs in one list, you can do this by first adding a custom list to your guide. Rename it to “Presentations”, “Resources”, or any other title that best fits your guide. Next, click the New button to add a list item, or add several items using a custom list template. The items in this list should be the names of the presentations or resources you’ll be providing.
After creating an item, or importing your custom list template, click to open an item in the list. Follow the instructions above to link a PDF document.
In this case, we do not recommend toggling the Include option, as this will make the file size of your guide very large. Instead, either keep the toggle off, so users can download the PDF to their device when they choose to access the item, or host the PDFs online and use the PDF URL option.
Link Your Documents to Other Components in the Guide
After linking the PDF file(s) to your list items in this document library, you can link these PDFs to various event sessions and other lists in your guide without having to re-upload the PDF each time.
From the Links tab, start typing in the name of a schedule session or the name of another list item (a Presenter, perhaps) to link to the item with the PDF.