Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’m doing well but I want to make my life a little simpler.
I want to make things a little more streamlined, a little less effort as we move along and
you know one thing that now takes more work than it used to take in this digital world
of ours?
It’s signing papers.
It used to be so simple.
People faxed you a document in the good old days.
You would sign it.
You would fax it back to them.
Job done, all taken care of.
Now they send you a PDF document and you would have to sign it using some digital tool that
you have or you have to print it off, sign it, scan it in and then send it back to them.
The problem is if you only occasionally have to sign documents, you have to remember the
tool when the time comes to use the tool.
You might have signed up for a service like HelloSign which I use and I think is an awesome
service but if you only use it occasionally, it’s hard to remember how you set things
up and if you use it a little bit more than occasionally, it costs money which you don’t
really want to have to spend money if you don’t have to.
So there has to be an easier way, does it not?
Well, there is an easier way and I’m going to show it to you right now on DottoTech.
I kind of have to give you one caveat.
The easier way to do this is actually only the easier way for Mac people.
I’m not sure how to do this in the Windows world if there is an easy way.
Here’s a suggestion.
If there’s an easy way to do this in the Windows world, make a note of it and tell
us in the Comments area below so that I know how to do it in the world of Windows.
In the world of Mac, here’s how you do it.
Every Mac ships with a free tool called Preview.
Preview is designed to allow us to open any sort of image, any graphic, any PDF and to
preview it on our computer.
But if we go into the Preview, if we go into the Preferences in Preview, we can find there
Signatures.
This is a little bit of magic.
You can create a signature that you can save.
Do you see this little box right here?
Let me move it up.
There it is.
Do you see this little box?
This is using the webcam and it’s giving us a little line and telling us exactly what
to do.
Take a piece of paper.
Sign your name on the paper and then take the paper and then put it on the line here.
When you see it resolve on the right-hand side right here and you’ve got the signature
looking just how you want it to—now this is just because of the extra light I have
here; it’s a little bit blown out; there we go—you can capture the signature.
Now that’s just a fake signature.
That’s not my real signature but there it is.
It’s now saved.
Here’s where this becomes absolutely beautiful.
When the kids’ school sends you a permission form—it says please sign this and send it
back—you can open that signature form in Preview, you can apply the signature and then
you save it and send it back.
Let me show you how that works.
I’m going to go and I’m going to open a document that might require some signatures.
Here we go.
This is actually my speaking contract for me.
Down here at the very bottom, you can apply a signature.
All you do to apply the signature to this is you choose Tools, you choose Annotate,
you choose Signature and you choose the signature that you want to use.
Click on that.
You can resize it.
You can position it exactly where you want to then you can take this document, you can
save it as a PDF and email it back with the signature in place.
Even the signature area here keeps track of when you use the signatures.
It’s not perhaps the most elegant.
If you have lots and lots of signatures to track then a service like HelloSign is a perfect
service to use.
But for those occasional signatures when you need to just create one quickly and send it
off to keep things moving and you don’t want to waste a lot of time or any money,
the signature tool might just be the answer for you.
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
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Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.