Exports

Every guide can be downloaded in seven formats, for the places a Help Center link will not reach: a support ticket, a training deck, an onboarding email, a printed binder, another site.

Where to export

• In the editor — the Export box in the sidebar.
• On the guide page — the Download card in the sidebar. Anyone who can see the guide can download it, not only authors.

Click a format to download it. A progress bar shows while the file is made, with Cancel to stop. When it is done you see Downloaded and the file name, which is taken from the guide’s title.

One export runs at a time; the other buttons wait until it finishes.

The formats

Format	File	Best for
Video	MP4 or WebM	Sharing a task as something people watch
Animated GIF	GIF	Chat, tickets, emails and READMEs, where video does not play inline
PDF	PDF	Sending, attaching and archiving
Word	DOCX	Editing the guide further, or pasting into your own documents
Web page	HTML	A single page to open in any browser
Markdown	MD	Wikis, knowledge bases and code repositories
SimplifyGuide file	JSON	Moving a guide to another site

Video

A produced screen recording of the guide. It opens with a title card showing the guide title, number of steps, date and site, and closes with a Guide complete card.

In between, a camera follows the action the way a person filming would. It zooms in once, then glides smoothly from one place where something happens to the next, and only zooms back out when a step has nothing to point at. It does not zoom in and out on every click. A pointer travels to each target and clicks, a soft spotlight marks it, and the step’s instruction appears as a caption, always in the same place at the bottom. When a step moves to a new screen, the new screen dissolves in under the camera. Keyboard shortcuts get a card of their own.

If the guide has narration, it becomes the soundtrack, and each step stays on screen for as long as it took while you recorded, so the voice lines up with the picture. Without narration, each step stays up long enough to read its text — at least a few seconds.

Two things to know:

• It plays in real time. The video is recorded as it plays, so making a two-minute video takes about two minutes. Keep the tab open until it finishes.
• The browser decides the format. MP4 is used where the browser can record it, WebM otherwise — the button shows which you will get. If the browser cannot record video at all, the button is disabled with This browser cannot record video. Try Chrome, Edge or Firefox.

Animated GIF

One frame per step: the instruction in a caption bar above the annotated screenshot, each shown for two and a half seconds, then looping. Up to 960 pixels wide. GIFs are limited to 256 colours per frame, so screenshots with gradients or photos look slightly grainy.

PDF

A4 pages with a cover (title, description and number of steps) followed by a card for each step: its number, instruction, note and annotated screenshot. Pages are numbered.

Each card is drawn as an image, which is what lets any language render correctly — Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and so on. The catch is that the step text in the PDF cannot be selected or searched. If you need selectable text, open the guide page and use Print, then save as PDF from the print dialog.

Word

A .docx document with the guide title and description, then each step as a heading — “Step 1: ” followed by its instruction — with its note and annotated screenshot beneath. A4, and it opens in Word, Google Docs, Pages and LibreOffice. Everything is editable, so this is the format to use when the guide is a starting point for your own document.

Web page (HTML)

A single HTML page with the guide in the same layout as the Help Center and the styles built in, so it looks right in any browser without your theme.

The screenshots are not inside the file: the page loads them from your site. It displays them wherever your site can be reached, and shows the text only where it cannot.

Markdown

The title, the description, and a numbered list of steps with the instruction in bold, the note beneath, and a link to the full-size screenshot on your site. The links point at the plain screenshots, so highlights and annotations are not included.

SimplifyGuide file (JSON)

A complete copy of the guide for moving it to another site running SimplifyGuide, saved as your-guide.simplifyguide.json. It holds the title, description, starting screen, and every step — instruction, note, source badge, highlight, annotations, and everything Show me needs to find the element — with the screenshots embedded in the file.

It does not include the narration audio, who the guide is shown to, or the Public setting.

Importing a SimplifyGuide file

1. Go to SimplifyGuide → Guides and press Import guide. It is also on the Classic UI list.
2. Choose the .simplifyguide.json file.
3. When it finishes, the new guide opens in the editor.

The import is always a new draft, so nothing appears in anyone’s Help Center until you publish it. If a guide with the same title exists, the new one gets a distinct title. Screenshots are added to your Media Library. The guide gets your site’s default audience, and is not public.

Limits:

• Files up to 40 MB, and up to 200 steps.
• Screenshots must be PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 8 MB each. Any that are not are skipped; the steps are still imported.
• A file made by a newer version of SimplifyGuide is refused with This file was made by a newer version of SimplifyGuide. Update the plugin, then import it again.

You need to be able to author guides and upload files to import.

Step addresses are stored as paths on the site, such as /wp-admin/options-general.php, so Show me works on the new site as long as it has the same screens.

Branding

Video, GIF, PDF and Word exports carry your branding from SimplifyGuide → Settings → Branding:

Setting	Where it appears
Brand colour	Highlights, step numbers, captions and accents
Logo	Video frames and end card, GIF end card, every PDF page header, the Word document
Footer line	Video and GIF end cards, every PDF page, the Word footer
Credit — “Made with SimplifyGuide”	Same places as the footer line, when turned on

Annotations keep the colours you drew them in. The GIF only gets an end card when a logo, footer line or credit is set.

The Web page export uses your brand colour. Markdown and the SimplifyGuide file carry no branding. See Branding.

Files are made in your browser

Video, GIF, PDF, Word and the SimplifyGuide file are built in your browser from the guide’s data. Nothing is sent to an outside service, and your server does no extra work — but a large guide can take a moment, and a slow computer takes longer. Web page and Markdown are small text files that your site prepares and sends directly.