Hi everyone, Kevin here.
Today I want to show you how you can edit a PDF file entirely for free.
It's not going to cost you anything.
Now, I don't know about you, but one of the most annoying things is you have a PDF file,
and you need to make a quick edit to it, or you need to insert a signature,
and it turns out you have to get an app.
Now most apps out there put a watermark on when you make edits or if you go for
the official Adobe Acrobat app, it costs $14.99 per month. Luckily,
there are some fantastic apps out there that let you edit PDFs, and they don't charge anything.
Now, I had four different criteria that I looked for in a PDF editor.
First off, I wanted it to be free or if it wasn't free,
I wanted it to be an app that I already have.
The second, I didn't want it to insert any watermarks,
third I wanted to be able to edit, and fourth, I wanted to be able to insert a signature,
and luckily there were a few apps that could do that, and today I'm going to share those with
you. All right, well, why don't we jump on the PC and let's get started. Here I am on my desktop,
and I have a PDF file that I need to make a few edits to.
I'm going to open up the PDF by double clicking on it.
This opens up the PDF file and it opened it up within a viewer.
Now, like I said before, I need to make a few tweaks to the file.
Right up here, it says insert partner name.
I want to be able to type text directly here at the end of this paragraph,
and down below within the PDF, there's a signature field and I'd like to insert my signature.
Now unfortunately, this is just a viewer, so I won't be able to edit it,
but luckily there are a few apps that will let me do that, so why don't we jump into the first one.
The first app is Microsoft Word.
This app isn't free, but it's widely available and most people already have the app,
and surprisingly, Word can open PDF files, and then you can edit those PDF files.
How do we do that?
Well, here I am on the Word start page, and I have my PDF file on my desktop.
To open it within Word, all I need to do is click on the PDF
and drag it over onto the Word start page.
When I drag it over, I see a prompt from Microsoft Word telling me that
Word will convert my PDF into an editable Word document, that's exactly what I want Word to do.
It does call out one caveat though.
It says that if my PDF has lots of images or lots of graphics,
the conversion might not look quite like the original PDF, so just one thing to keep
in mind if you're using Microsoft Word for the conversion. That all sounds good to me.
I'm going to click on OK.
This opens up my PDF file and it looks pretty similar to what my PDF looked like.
In fact, it looks pretty much identical to my original PDF,
and if I click on it, I can make edits to this text.
Look at this, I could type things in and I'm going to insert the partner name right here.
I've typed in the partner name and I could easily go in and edit that.
Now when I go down below, there's the signature field.
Luckily here too I could easily insert the signature.
In fact, I could edit it just like any other Word document.
For this signature, I have a signature file on my desktop.
I'm just going to drag and drop this into my Word document.
This inserts the signature into my Word document, and I could insert signatures,
I can type text, I can modify the text.
All of this looks good. Once I'm done making my edits,
it's in a Word document though. How do I get this back into the PDF format?
It's pretty easy to do.
All we need to do is go up to the top left-hand corner,
click on the file menu, and then go down to the option that says export.
When you click on export, you'll see that there's the option to create a PDF.
Let's click on this button that says create PDF.
Next, I'll see a prompt where I can publish it to a PDF and I simply need to type in the name
and I'm going to leave the original name, but I'll append Word to the end.
Let's click on publish. Here now you see the PDF that I published in Word and if I zoom in,
this is now back in PDF format, and you'll see that my edit shows up in here
with the partner name and if I go down below, I see my signature, so Word works pretty well.
The only downside though is Word does cost money.
You need Microsoft Office to be able to use Word.
The main reason I'm recommending it is that many people already have Word.
Also, another downside is if you just want to edit PDFs,
you do have to install the entire Microsoft Office suite, so you're getting a lot more apps
beyond just Word, but overall, this is a very good option to edit PDF files.
Next, I want to show you how you can edit a PDF in your web browser for free,
and by far, my favorite online PDF editor is the Sejda editor.
The reason I like it so much is it doesn't require any installation at all,
and the free version gives you most of the functionality that you need.
It is a freemium service, so they do have some additional functionality that you get,
but once again, the free version is pretty good.
There are a few caveats with the free version. The document can only be up to
200 pages or 50 megabytes, and you can only convert 3 PDFs per hour.
I found for my needs that's more than enough and that's why I recommend this service.
To get started, all we need to do is, once again, let's click on our PDF file,
and we can drag and drop it over onto the Sejda website.
This now opens up the PDF on the web, and here too,
just like in Word, it looks like it does a fantastic job at the conversion.
Let's test out editing. There I could insert custom text.
It doesn't have the exact fonts, but I'm going to replace the original font
to use one that's close to the font that I'm using in my PDF.
Next, I want to insert my signature into the document.
I'm going to go up to this top bar here, click on add images, and there I see my signature selected.
I'm going to click on this image.
Now I can drag and drop it down into where I want to insert it on the document,
and there's my signature within the document.
I have my text, I have my signature, all of this looks good. Now with the Sejda editor,
they also offer many rich controls. For instance, I could insert more text, I could create a form,
I could insert any number of images or signatures, I could wipe things out, I could annotate the
document, so it has a lot of richness above and beyond just editing and inserting a signature,
but this is all I needed to do to this document, so I'm going to click on apply changes.
Once I click on apply changes, it now gives me the option to download the document.
I'm going to click on download.
This now downloads a copy of the PDF.
Let's click on this to see what it looks like.
And here too, my PDF looks exactly like I want it.
I edited the text right here and I also see my signature inserted into the document, so this
also works extremely well. Last, I want to show you how you can edit a PDF using LibreOffice.
LibreOffice has an app called Draw that’ll allow us to open a PDF and make edits to a PDF.
If you don't have LibreOffice, you can download it on their homepage by clicking on download now.
The one downside though of LibreOffice is that it requires you to download an entire office suite.
It includes apps similar to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
So basically, your office productivity software.
I'm going to go ahead and download it and then let's test this out with editing PDFs.
Once you finish installing LibreOffice, go to your Start menu and type in
LibreOffice Draw and that'll open up the drawing app.
Here too, let's go up to the file menu and let's go down to open, navigate to
where you have the PDF on your computer, and then click on the PDF, and click on open.
This opens the PDF in LibreOffice Draw, and here too, I could click on my text,
and I could edit it just like I could in Word and in the Sejda editor.
I'm going to type in the partner name right here.
There I made an edit to the document and now I want to insert the signature,
and just like with the other experiences, I can simply drag and drop my signature in.
This’ll insert my signature and then I can drag and drop it into
the exact position where I want my signature.
Here too, I can do more than just edit the text.
I could also insert new text. I could insert shapes. I could insert images. I could highlight
objects. I have full functionality and richness of an image editing app.
Once I'm done making all of my changes, to export it as a PDF again, let's go up to the top
left-hand corner, click on file, and then on the file menu, go down to export as.
Within export as, you can export as a PDF, let's click on that.
This opens up a PDF options prompt.
All of the defaults look good to me.
Let's now click on export.
This opens up the window save dialog.
I'm going to click on this name and then I'll simply append
draw to the end and now click on save.
Let's now click on the file on the desktop to see how it turned out.
Here's my file that I just saved and look at that. I have the text that I inserted. I also
see my signature down here. So here too, with LibreOffice Draw, I can also edit PDF files.
All right, well that was a quick look at how you can edit a PDF file
entirely for free using three different apps.
If this video helped you learn how you can edit a PDF, please give this video a
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And lastly, let me know if you have any other
video topics that you want to see me cover in the future.
That's how I build my list of videos to create. All right, well, that's all I have for you today,
I hope you enjoyed, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.