How to Create an Electronic Signature in PDF

How to eSign a document: how create digital

[ Music playing ] [ Music playing ] [ Music playing ] Hey everyone, back here with another exciting tutorial to get you through the doldrums of the office workday without too much anguish. Today I'm going to show you how to set up a digital signature in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. The program is free and can be downloaded at Adobe.com's web site as you can see on the screen What is Acrobat Reader? It's a program by Adobe that allows you to view and fill in PDF forms created with Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Live Cycle. P-D-F stands for portable document format. It is a popular to share documents and forms across the web when other programs like Microsoft Word or Excel just won't do. Great! Right? But, why do you need a digital signature for these documents? Often, you need to certify that the information on a document is correct when you can't be there in person. A digital signature that locks a document lets the reader know the information you sent to them hasn't been edited by anyone but you. Digital signatures have the power to "lock" the document if the creator set it up correctly. Now, on to creating and signing a document. First, open Acrobat Reader. Navigate to "Edit" on the menu and select "Preferences" at the bottom. For a protip, press Ctrl + K on your keyboard to bring up the Preferences window. Once on the Preferences window, under the Categories section on the left side, choose "Signatures". Then, on the right-hand side under "Identities and Trusted Certificates", click the "More" button. Under the "Digital ID and Trusted Certificate Settings" window that pops up, be sure that the "Digital IDs" category is selected, and click "Add ID". A new window pops up: "Add Digital ID". Choose "A new digital ID I want to create now" and click "Next". Choose "New PKCS#12 digital ID file" and click "Next". Now, fill in the pertinent details of your digital ID. For name, enter your full name. For organizational unit, enter something like Human Resources or Accounting. For the organization name, entering the name of your company such as "ABC Widgets". For an email address, enter your email address. Choose your country or region if the default setting is not correct and leave the key algorithm at its default value. Under "Use digital ID for:", choose "Digital Signatures". Click "Next" once you're all done. If you make a mistake, you can always click the "Back" button. Now, you need to create a password only you know for your digital signature. Type it once in the Password box, and then again in the Confirm Password box. I recommend leaving the File Name field set at its default. When you've finished entering your password, click "Finish". Your new ID shows up in the window, and it can now be used to digitally sign documents. For the purposes of this tutorial, I've created a simple document with a text field...