Electronically Signing AFP Made Easy

Signed electronically myself

Here's a situation I'm pretty sure you've come across. Someone sends you an electronic document, like a contract or a lease to a sign and send back. Now, of course you can print it, sign it, scan it and send it back but fortunately, there are much easier ways to get this done. No printing or scanning is necessary. We're going to cover how to quickly sign PDF and other digital documents and don't worry if you don't have a digital image of your physical signature I'm going to show you how you can create one really fast. (upbeat music) Let's clarify one thing right away though. Often the terms electronic and digital signature are mixed up but they're two very different things. A true digital signature is encrypted data to verify the signers identity by using digital keys. It's the online version of a notarized signature. The more common type of signature that you're going to come across is an electronic signature. This is basically an image of your signature, that's placed on a document and I'm going to cover different ways you can get this done. You pick the one that works best for you. First option Office App. An easy way to sign a PDF is to use your smartphone. All you need on your smartphone is the free Microsoft Office app which is available for iOS and Android. You can download it super fast. After you installed it, open the app and you'll get to the home screen. Click on actions in the bottom right corner here. There are plenty of features built in here, but for now we're interested in this action called Sign a PDF. Now you have to locate the PDF you want to sign. If it's not in your recently open files click on browse in the top right corner. Here you can look for your file on OneDrive, SharePoint or on the phone itself. Once you've found the document, open the PDF by clicking on it, then all you have to do is to tap where you want to add your signature. Now, the first time you're using this you have to create a signature in the app. If you want, you can also change the ink color to green or blue from the default black. When you're done tap Store Signature, and then Done. This is going to save it in the app for you. Then just click into document and it's going to insert your signature. You can also drag it to the correct place or resize it if you want. When you're done signing, confirm by clicking the check mark in the top left hand corner. This is going to save the PDF together with your signature. Once that's done, you can use the share options down here, click on More Apps and you can send a copy of the document just select any app from the share control, like for example message, mail or teams. That's how easy it is to sign a PDF. But that's just one of the many tricks and features that's available in the Office App. Make sure you check out this video if you ever need to convert scan tables or texts to Excel and Word. Second option, Adobe Acrobat Reader. Another simple and free alternative to add an electronic signature to a PDF is to use Adobe's Fill and Sign feature. You're going to have to install the Acrobat reader from the Adobe website. It also comes in a Pro version, but for our purposes now we just need the free version, so the free reader. Once you installed it just open the PDF you want to sign. Up here, you're going to see this sign icon. When you use it for the first time you're going to need to create your signature. To do that, click on Sign Document, and then on Add Signature. It's going to give you three options to create it to type it, to draw your signature in the field, or to upload an image of your signature. Now I'm just going to go with type and type in my name. With change style here, you can select a different style of handwriting, so just go with the one you like. When you're done click Apply and then click at the place in the PDF where you want to place the signature. With the handle, you can resize your signature. You can add initials to your document too. You just have to first add the initials the same way we created the signature. It's a really fast and simple way to get this done. Third option, convert your physical signature. Another option is to create a digital image of your physical signature. This way you can insert it into any document you want. We're going to use an app that comes for free with windows 10, Paint 3D. Now, this is not the classic paint that's been a part of windows forever. Paint 3D is available since 2018 and it's merely for designing 3D shapes and models. But the advantage for our purpose is that we can create an electronic signature with a transparent background. This way we can use the signature on any document even if it's not white. This is how to do it. To open it, click the Windows Start button and type in Paint 3D. Select New to create a new document, select a marker of your choice. It's going to automatically adjust the thickness for you but you can change that if you want. Down here you can select a different color for your signature. Then just sign your name. You might need a few tries here but once you're done crop the image. You can use the handles on the sides here to get the right size for your image. That looks good, but the background is still white, we want it to be transparent. To change that select Canvas from the toolbar now just turn the transparent canvas on and the background is gone. Now you're ready to save it. Now, when you save your signature as an image, just make sure that you save it as a PNG. This way it's saved with the transparent background and that's it! Now you have a high quality electronic signature that you can insert into any document. For example, let's say we want it in this Word document go to Insert and insert the image. Just make sure you update the wrapping so that it fits well in your documents. So go to the options here and select Behind Text. Now you can adjust the size and just drag it and drop it where you want. I hope this video is going to help you save time and paper when it comes to electronically signing a document. Now comment below and let me know which version you prefer. As always if you liked this video, don't forget to hit that thumbs up and before you go on to watch the next video and you've realize you're not subscribed to this channel yet consider subscribing. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video. (upbeat music)