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How to eSign a document: digital signature licitness for forms

welcome to another tech help video brought to you by accesslearningzone.com I am your instructor Richard Rost in today's video I'm going to show you how to collect signatures directly in your Microsoft Access forms using the ink picture control now to be clear I'm talking about having someone actually sign a form in your database I'm not talking about digital signatures or digitally signing your database that's a whole separate video but if you want to collect customer signatures inside your database this video is for you today's question comes from Ralph in Reno Nevada one of my Platinum members Ralph says is there a way to capture customers signatures directly into my access database like the way that the post office does with their tablets when they drop off a package that requires a signature my field agents already have Windows based tablets that run our access database so I'm wondering if this is something that is easily done or not yes Ralph there is an ActiveX control called ink picture which I'll show you in just a minute and with that and a couple of lines of code you can save that signature and as I noted on the cover slide this is a developer level Tech help video so you need to know a little bit of VBA in order to follow along if you've never done any VBA programming before go watch this video it's free it's on my website it's on my YouTube channel it'll teach you everything you don't need to know to get started in about 20 minutes okay so here I am in my tech help free template this is a free database you can grab a copy off my website if you want to and I'm just going to use my single F form that I've got here it's a simple little single form I'm going to let's rename it first right click rename let's call this my signature f and I'll open this guy up and go to design view and I'm just going to pick these controls right off of here and we're going to put an ActiveX control on this guy now what is an ActiveX control an ActiveX control is a control that is not itself part of access and you can find them by clicking on this little guy to open up the toolbox and you'll see ActiveX controls right here now generally I recommend against using ActiveX controls unless everyone that's going to use this database has the exact same version of Microsoft Office and the exact same version of Windows preferably but at least the same version of office if you're making a database to distribute to a bunch of other people in a bunch of different places then I have I try to avoid ActiveX controls but if this is for you and your employees to use and everyone's got the same hardware and software setup same version of office you should be okay especially with this control because you're going to come down here and you're going to find the Microsoft ink picture control if it says Microsoft in the front it's generally safe it comes with office there's stuff for Outlook in here there's stuff for all kinds of other things in here but there's also stuff that might be installed by different software providers based on what you've got on your computer so try to stick with the Microsoft stuff if you can I've done some videos on some of these other controls in previous videos like the progress bar for example and some of these are okay so let's pick the ink picture control hit OK and there we get a pink a pink we have a picture box right there on our form okay we're gonna resize this guy to look like a signature block something like that all right and let's open up the properties for it right click go to properties and it's called ink picture four I'm going to rename that to just signature okay that's my signature block and let's resize this like this leave a little room down here for a button save it let's close it and open it up and see what you got there you go and if you notice if you move your mouse over you get this little pointer here and you can draw like this right just like you're saying signing something and if you got a tablet that's such sensitive you could use your pen or your finger okay a couple little modifications I'm gonna turn off these navigation buttons and the record selectors let's close this open it back up in design view open up the properties for the form let's turn off the Record selectors navigation buttons turn off the scroll bars and uh that's good enough for now all right close it save changes yes open it back up again all right that looks cool slide it where you want it okay and you can draw your little signature in there now drawing in the box is no big deal but we're going to need some VBA source code to save that drawing that ink as a file on our Drive now it's not super hard let's go back in the design design view here where we go sign view there it is okay let's drop a button down here so come up here find the command button drop it down there cancel the wizard change this so it says save signature okay and then we're going to open up this guy's properties and we're going to make this the save signature button right click build event that'll open up your VBA code editor there we go now there's not a lot of code involved I've tried to simplify this as much as possible so there's a lot of other things that you can add to it and I'm going to add a bunch more stuff in the Extended Cut like some error handling and some ways to deal with different file names and stuff but this is the minimal amount of code you need to get this to work all right first we need a variable it's going to be a byte array to store the actual picture in in memory so we can save it a byte array is basically an area of bytes don't worry about what that is it's just basically a block of memory we're going to save all of the different pixels in the image so we're going to dim ba and then open close parentheses that makes it an array as byte that's an area of bytes okay okay here's the next line I'm just going to paste it in for my clipboard all right ba our byte array is going to be equal to signature.object dot Inc dot save and then in parentheses two what does that mean well that tells the signature block object to save the data in it in the ba byte array and the two there means it wants to save it as a gif the gif file format yeah there are some other options I'm not going to cover them in this video trust me just use two use a gif okay next line open and then your file name where do you want to save this file to I'm going to save it as G colon backslash my drive backslash signature dot gif for binary as number one that's going to open up a binary file using file handle number one and save that data from the byte array which is the data from the signature block to that file right there okay that opens the file the next line put number one comma comma ba actually puts the data from the byte array in the file and then close number one we're all done with that file and that's it that's the minimal amount of code you need to get this thing to work all right all right so close this let's close it save it whatever open it back up again I'm gonna scroll my name in here draw it with the mouse the best I can and then hit save signature okay close that down and now I'll go check my drive and there in my my drive folder is my signature.gift there it is and that's it that's the minimal amount of code you need to get this to work but of course that minimal amount of code doesn't really do a whole lot aside from collect the signature and save it as a file you want to do more stuff with it inside your database right for example you might want to go into a customer's orders and then down here on the bottom of their order form click on get signature have this guy pop up have them sign it save it and it saves that in the database right see that or you go to somebody else let's go to uh go to John Luke Picard go to one of his orders get signature right J L P save it there it is print out his invoice his signature is right on his invoice see that okay that's a lot more useful and I will show you how to do all that in the Extended Cut for members we will save those collected signature files with a special file name based on the order ID so we know which signature file belongs to which order ID will display that signature on the order form and on the invoice we'll also make a clear button so you can clear it or delete it that's all covered in the Extended Cut for the members silver members and up get access to all of my Extended Cut videos and gold members can download these databases if you enjoyed this video please give me a thumbs up and post any comments you may have I do try to read and answer all of them as soon as I can make sure you subscribe to my channel which is completely free and click on the Bell icon to select all to receive notifications when new videos are posted make sure you click the show more link down below the video to find additional resources and links you'll see a list of other videos additional information related to the 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over four hours long and I just updated it for 2021 you can find it on my website or on my YouTube channel I'll include a link below that you can click on and also if you like level one level two is just one dollar yep that's all one dollar and it's free for all members of my YouTube channel at any level even supporters want to have your question answered in a video just like this one visit my tech help page on my website you can send me your question there while you're on my site feel free to stop by the access forum lots of good conversations happening there be sure to follow my blog find me on Twitter and of course YouTube once again my name is Richard Ross thank you for watching this Tech help video brought to you by accesslearningzone.com I hope you enjoyed this video and that you learned something today I'll see you again soon