How to create a digitally fillable PDF in InDesign || Perfect for Worksheets, Forms, Contracts

[Music] foreign [Music] I am Cheryl here at the made on Sunday studio and I talk all about branding design and creative entrepreneurship here so if you are starting your own creative business then be sure to subscribe to follow along now in today's video I am creating a tutorial that is very much loved on this channel which is how to create a digitally fillable PDF but instead of Designing it on canva today we are going to be designing it on Adobe InDesign so if you are a fellow designer friend or you just don't use canva and you prefer using the Adobe suite then this is your tutorial to up level your PDFs into an interactive PDF with Adobe let's get started all right welcome to my laptop I have my Adobe InDesign open right now with the just like a PDF design that I've created just before I film this video so this could be anything could be like a workbook or a worksheet or a contract that you're creating um but basically uh design it all out have a title have your different questions and create um you can either for the form Fields either create a colored box like this or even do like an outline box if you want so maybe I will do outline box I make it like green and I'm actually going to save this color right here so I can match it maybe make that a little bit thinner and then I'm going to do the same with this one so you can either have a filled in box or have a non-filled in box that doesn't really matter or you can use like you know under lines like this so I just did the underline right here and added kept adding them until we get to the end here um or you can even just create a line if you want like this you can create a line here hold down shift to keep it straight and that's a possibility as well I'm just going to remove this right here and then if you want to do check boxes you can also make those interactive so you can add your check boxes here as well as ADD like links so maybe I want my website to be down here so I can go ahead and add that text box and then make it um just gonna put this back to Essentials and I'm gonna make this Center aligned a line to the middle of the page and then just make this box and there we go all right so let's just say you have your design done now and you are ready to make this PDF interactive so there are a couple of places where we would like to do that it would be right here so this is your question and this is the box where they can answer like a multi-line text here same as this one and then these are like single line text so there's a name email address right here I'm hoping to create some sort of like a drop down so there's a selection that they can do like maybe an age range as well as here as well it's also I also want this to be like a drop down with different um choices for education so they don't have to type it in and then this one is obviously check marks so we'll have to make these into check marks and then this into a hyperlink all right so let's get started so first off I want to change my view here from Essentials which is usually the default to interactive for PDF because this will then open up a couple of different views here that will be helpful for making this interactive so the first one here is this box so you want to select the box that you want to create make it interruptive and then you're going to click on buttons and forms right here so there are a couple things that you can do you can do buttons and check boxes and you know lists but for this specific one if we want to do a multi-line paragraph it is a text field so I'm going to choose text field and then I'm going to there's a couple of ways to make this active the most popular one is on release or tap so if you click on it then it will make it able to type into so we're going to keep that and then we want to make this printable so in case if someone wants to print this out after they type into it it will show so we want to make sure that that is printable and multi-line so that they are typing multiple lines and also scrollable so if let's say they want to type more than what's given here the space is given here they can still keep typing and then they'd be able to scroll through the answer as well there is also um a choice to make it required so if this was a contract where they need to submit it back to you then in order if you check this then they are required to fill this out before submitting it to you and then you can choose your font here I'm just going to choose like the most popular like minion Pro like everybody has minion Pro on their computer or even use Times New Roman or something but I typically like to make the text smaller just so um you know they can see more of the text on the page so usually I go from around 8 to 10 so I'm going to put 9 here and then I'm going to make it like regular um so that's it so all you have to do is that now you can either name your field here now so you can name this like question one let's say this is very important to actually do name um because you'll see that in the next box here um we can either do that all over again which so you would go click on this thing and then click on buttons and forms or you can just copy and paste it over so you can either hold on to option and then drag it over and now you have exactly the same settings um that you want so it's exactly the same type so it makes it just super easy you don't have to redo all of the different settings but it's so important that you make sure that the name is different so right here this is still question one and then uh well Adobe uh Adobe InDesign was smart enough to rename it for you so you just need to make sure that this is renamed to a different title because if it is the same name when someone types into one of them it will also appear in the next box that has the same name so just make sure that they are named differently all right now we're gonna do these one line texts so um because this one doesn't have a box it's just lines we're going to have to create a text box there so we're gonna go into this little rectangle frame right here and create a space here um where they can type in so with that there I'm going to go back to buttons and forms and I'm going to add text field again and this text field this time is going to be make sure that it is not multi-line because there's only one line there I'm going to name this to name um and then you want to make sure that this all of these settings are correct again so nine regular scrollables so if it is going to go longer than this then it is still scrollable which is good and printable all right so that looks good to me I'm going to then again copy these over to the next line because it will be using the same settings [Music] um right over here as well as for this one so these are also one line text this one in particular I'm going to drag it over all the way to the end and you just want to make sure to rename these so this is email and then the rest of the settings should be fine and then this one is address all right so those three are done now we want to create um a scroll down here so we want some options so what you're going to do is you're going to create that text box again into the space right here and then instead of doing text field this time we're going to do combo box so there's actually two ways to do kind of like a list format so I'm going to do both so you can see what they look and how they look differently so the first one is combo box and this one will actually like like drop down a list and you can see all of them after you click into it so I'm going to call this age range and then you need to create your list so let's say we want to do like zero to 18. um 19 to 30. I'm 31 to 50 let's say and then maybe 50 plus or something so that's your list and then we want to change the text again and then that is it so that one looks good now we're going to create another one uh right here for education and then we're going to want to name this one instead of combo box you can also do list box so it's pretty similar but there is slight differences you're going to be able to see all of the options at one time with this one so again we're going to create our list so we have um education is probably like primary secondary and um college or university whatever you want and then maybe like post-grad okay cool we want to make this nine um and then we want to rename this to education okay so those look good just make sure um so if this is a if you want to allow it to have multi-selection then you're going to want to click on multi-selection here but because you can only fit into one age group or fit into you know your highest education in one group then I won't be checking this but let's say it's like what are the different social medias that you're on then you want to have like a multi-selection here and you want to select this one right here so in this case I am not but for list box this one's actually going to show more um options so I actually need to make this box a little bit bigger so then I can see all of the options at once um it's okay if it overlaps like this it's only when it's selected that it will show it all the way down here okay so we have these done now we want to make these into check boxes so I'm gonna hover over one of them and then we're going to make this a check box and as you can see here the checks box currently looks like this which I don't really like the look of right now so you can actually go in and like click on the different [Music] um and just like make it look better like let's say I want again that like green color for the check box I think that looks better and then for this one maybe it looks a little bit too thick so I want to make it a thinner maybe I'll just make this um like a green as well there we go I think that looks um let's say you know more branded and then we're gonna actually um copy and paste this over there we go and I'm going to delete these as well and I'm going to maybe um just copy all three of them over so it's just a lot faster that way I'm gonna hold down on option again and drag these over [Music] there we go and just we want to make sure that we are naming all of them correctly so as long as they all have different names and we should be good so two three four five six seven so Adobe InDesign didn't used to rename these boxes automatically but they are renaming it now that's probably an update that they've done so it makes it so much faster so that's great all right so next up is I want to make this a hyperlink so I'm actually going to right click this and I'm going to go to hyperlink so um by the way one other tip if you wanted to just make something interactive without going into this box you can actually do it right on the right click as well so if you right click something you can also find interactive and then this same box will pop up so anyways for this one we want to do a hyperlink so so this one is a URL to made on sundays.com which is my website and we're just going to click on OK here and there we go so all of this should be good now I am then going to export this PDF now so we're going to go to file and export and I'm just going to name this completed just so we know which one is which and it's so important that you export as interactive PDF because if you export this to a regular PDF it's not going to make all those interactive Fields show and then you want to look all the way down here these can be all the defaults no problem you're going to look down here and just make sure that this is checked include all forms and media and then you want to export it all right we have the document open now and then we're going to click into each of them and just see if they all work hello example and we're just gonna do this so we can see that it continues scrolling perfect that's awesome and then this is going to be the same obviously this will be your one line text and then we have your email um whatever it is and then you can also type in your address and then right here we have here which is the combo box so you can basically click on this and it'll show the selection this is actually my preferred list option so this is the one that I would usually do because it's it's more clean this way and then this one will show all of the selection at once so you can click on whichever it is this is the list box so I don't prefer this one but it's an option there as well all right so next next is your check boxes so I'm just gonna put my head here and then now you can click on these and it will allow you to check the boxes and then last but not least is your website here so if you click on it um it opened up into my different screen but here it is um it's opened up into my website so there we go that is how you create an interactive PDF on InDesign and that is it you guys I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and if you did be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this thank you so much for learning with me today and I can't wait to see you in the next video bye foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: Made on Sundays

Views: 42,413

Keywords: adobe indesign, how to create a digitally fillable pdf, interactive pdf, how to create a form, how to create a contract, how to create a fillable worksheet

Id: G2MunphyhkI

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022