User guide

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Using Excel to create interactive presentations
BrightSign can play a sophisticated sign that is described in an interactive playlist. An interactive
playlist is a simple text file that contains a list of information separated by commas. Using
Microsoft Excel, you can create an interactive playlist to describe a sophisticated interactive sign
using a text table. The table describes which media to play, and which media to play when a user
presses a button or triggers other events.
A good example of an interactive playlist is the one used in the BrightSign demo. You can run the
demo to see what it does, and then modify it to meet your needs.
1 Run the demo as described in the introduction.
2 Find the file AUTOPLAY.CSV in the zip file and copy it onto your desktop.
3 Double-click AUTOPLAY.CSV to open it into Microsoft Excel (you must have Excel installed
on your computer. If not, you can load it into any text editor, but the file won’t display in
table format).
4 Edit the file to meet your needs (see Keywords for a description commands you can include
in your interactive playlist file).
5 Use the Save As… command to keep your changes and select CSV as the file format.
NOTE: Brightsign requires a comma-separated CSV file. If you’re outside the United States, check
the regional settings in Excel and make sure the list separator is a comma and the decimal
separator is a period. Brightsign requires a comma-separated CSV file with periods as the decimal
separator (international defaults may vary).
Below is a section of the AUTOPLAY.CSV file from the BrightSign demo. Due to space limitations,
it does not include all the columns. The columns not shown here are similar to the 5 right-hand
columns, and they describe what happens when the user presses buttons or when a video
finishes or a slide times out.