How to Create a Fillable PDF Document for Free (PDF Escape 2023 Update)

hello hello I'm Cheryl here at the maid on Sunday studio and I talk about branding design and all things creative entrepreneurship here so if you are building out your dream business right now then be sure to subscribe to follow along now in today's video I am going to be talking all about how to create digitally fillable PDF forms these are interactive documents that are great to share with your online audience whether it be a freebie a digital product or a form or contract and it really allows the end user the person that you're sending the document to to be able to fill out this form whether it is like you know written text or a check box or a drop down and then they'd be able to save it and store themselves or send it back to you for completion now I have created a bunch of these videos in the past I've talked about how to design them on canva and then and basically submit it into PDF escape to make them interactive for free and this video is basically going to be my 2023 update of how to make and use PDF escape to make your document interactive now recently PDF Escape actually came up with a huge update and you guys need help so without further Ado I'm going to be helping you navigate this new PDF Escape update so let's get right into it alright welcome to my laptop I am on the PDF Escape website now and what you're going to see is this page right here where you can do desktop or free online usually I just use free online so I'm going to click onto that and then once I get into that page right there um I'm gonna get be giving given the option to upload a PDF to PDF Escape so once you have your document created and exported as a PDF you're going to then upload it into PDF escape and it did that pretty quickly all right so I am going to zoom in a little bit you can actually use this right here and zoom in and out or I just literally um like zoomed in with my laptop um so first things first is you can add form Fields um by clicking on insert and then form field right here and we are going to start off with the text functionality so let's click into select one thing to keep in mind though is with this new PDF Escape update things are a little bit glitchy so my number one tip first is to be patient things are a little bit slower than it was before um what you're going to see here once you click on text is you're going to see this little um like cross as well as the little rectangle so if you want to just keep the ranked rectangle shape as is you can just um like match the rectangle to here and then just click on it but because my rectangle is way bigger here I'm actually going to use where it it has the X I'm going to match the X to the left top hand corner and then drag it out to where my text box ends and then now it's going to add this text box so I know a lot of you were struggling with doing multi-line so if you just leave it as this right now it's just going to be one big one line text so your font size right now is going to be like this big so you don't want that you want this to be a multi-line paragraph and what you're going to do is you're going to click on this little edit button which is like this pencil and you're going to click gently on your text box and as you can see glitch number one is that every time not every time sometimes when you click on edit it will move your box so all you have to do is just move it back let's give it a second and you're all good all right we got this so now that you have this box uh kind of selected you're gonna go into this right here which is I guess the settings button this wrench and we are going to make this multi-line so I'm make sure you check multi-line and this will allow you to have a paragraph multi-line paragraph text insert here in this section so you don't have to like you know do anything else don't click on this uh don't uncheck visible because you may think that means that you're going to remove the color box in the background that's not true it needs to be visible or else people won't be able to type into it and then you're going to click on OK and this will make your text box multi-line like be able to be multi-line one other note I wanted to make at this point is that unfortunately um with this new uh update you won't be able to change the text font as well as the size so it's just whatever is like default on PDF Escape that is what you're going to be allowed to do so unfortunately there's no changing of that once you're finished with your editing you're going to then go back into the hand here which allows you to move up and down the document and then we're going to add the check boxes so let's play with check boxes here let's click on check box and then we're going to see how there's like that box here again so you can if your box is the same size you can literally just match the box and just click once and it will create your box or if you want to be more exact you can use the um the cross again match the cross to the top left hand corner and then drag it out so my box is a little bit bigger so I'm going to use the custom functionality all right so I'm just going to delete this first box right here so I'm going to click on the edit button again I'm going to click on this box and I'm going to click on delete this time so let's go back to adding that last check box right here and I'm going to do this Perfect all right so that looks good um then this section right here I want to make it um like you can only check one of the boxes um which is I'm gonna go down to radio button actually so I'm going to go on select and again I am going to drag it out into the space I sharp should have probably made these into circles instead but oh well in your design if you want to do this you should probably make them into circles and then they would make more sense and in this scenario I'm just going to show you what this means it means that if you click on one of these boxes um let me just then you can only click on one box at a time so it's gonna uncheck the other box so that is what a radio check box is um so that's going to be this section perfect and then uh if you want to have multiple radio boxes um like these ones so let's say there's this question that's only click one and then there's another section that's like only click one just make sure that they are all named correctly so in this case I'm going to click on this one so this is essentially one group right now we're gonna go on settings again and right now these will be all named button seven so you want to make sure that they are all named the same button seven button seven and that ensures that they are all part of the same group so you can name this whatever you like but it just needs to be named the same if you have another group you'll just need to make sure that that other group is all named the same as well and that will make sure that they all belong into the same radio uh what do you what do they call it radio button group all right so I hope that was clear the next section is easy I'm just gonna do uh text boxes but one line text boxes so I'm going to click on select again I'm going to use my my custom one here and this again is default um one line text so just to make sure that that is true I'm going to click on this with edit button again click on this little wrench and if as long as multiline is not checked it means that it is single line so it is all good right now so these are all correct next up is we are going to be adding um a drop down so in this section I'm going to click on drop down and I'm going to go to select and right here I'm going to add a drop down so what I need to do next is I'm going to go to edit again I'm going to click on this section again the Box move but that's okay because we can move it back we're going to go into settings and we are going to add our options so just for ease I'm going to put option one just want to click on enter and that will go to your next options oops three and option four let's say there's four options right now we're going to click on OK and what that's going to do is that is going to create this little arrow button right here where when they click on that there are going to be four options that they can choose from all right next up is we are or we're going to test out this um list box which is the last thing we are going to be testing out with this new update so instead of it dropping down to show the different options this will instead show all of the options right away so I'm just going to add this little box here and I'm going to go and click on this sorry edit click on this and then we're going to add our options again so option one option two option three and option four and let's see how that looks so a little bit different from the drop down so in the drop down you have to click on this to show the options but on uh list box uh it's actually going to show all of the options at once so you can basically just click on the one that you want so if all looks good let's just double check that everything looks good we are going to then export our PDF so I'm going to click on this little button right here which exports your document and I'm going to save it into my files here um all right we got that so let's just double check that all the fields work so this is supposed to be our multi line so let's just test this out hello this is a multi-line text which looks like it's working perfectly awesome and then this section is our check boxes oh by the way you can change this to checks instead of crosses so I'm just going to show you that really quickly if you go into your settings again so I'm going to click on edit and I'm going to click on my check box and settings instead of across you can do check circle diamond all the different um options so I'm just going to do star for this one just to show you what that will look like so instead of a cross it will be a star so I really like that they still have those options available all right next up is our radio button so right now um only one will be checked and then um one note here that I noticed is if you export it with the options selected it will show that as the default so if you wanted to show nothing like this should be blank and this should be blank then make sure to like uncheck those things before you start exporting so there is the drop down function so now they can choose one of the below and then there's also this option where they can choose one of one of them in the box as well what did they call it called it the list box yep so they can now click on one of these and that will be one of their options as well just make sure to remind whoever you are sending this to to save it and open it in a PDF reader because if they are viewing the documents on a browser then they won't be able to save it because they're opening it on the cloud so make sure if you want this option um you want your you know whoever is receiving this to be able to fill it in and save it into the documents you should remind them to actually like save the document tell them to save the document within their documents not open on a browser and then open it at with any kind of PDF reader and just tell them to save you can do command s or go to file and save and then that will be saved in their documents with um all of this populated so another few tips there I know there were some questions about that um in my previous video so I just want to make sure that I always make it clear how to export um and how my users should download these documents and save the documents afterwards so they have a copy of it with you know with all of their things typed in all right so I hope that was clear and I hope that was helpful um it definitely is a bit tricky to use with the new PDF Escape I think it just requires a little bit of practice the good thing is it is still entirely free to use so um we should be grateful that uh you know there aren't a lot of free interactive tools out there for making your PDFs fillable online so while it is still free we just need to be a little bit more patient it is a little bit um you know harder to use than it was before but um I hope this video really helped you solve some of those issues that you had and that is it you guys I hope you enjoyed the video and if you did be sure to like this video And subscribe for more videos like this now if you are in the stage of actually just designing the document on canva right now you might be interested in this video coming up I would highly recommend checking it out you are basically going to be designing this document with me together on canvas so I guess I will see you in that upcoming video see you there bye foreign [Music]

Channel: Made on Sundays

Views: 27,931

Keywords: pdfescape, fillable pdf, pdf editor, how to create a fillable pdf for free, pdfescape update, checkboxes on form, how to create an interactive pdf, fillable worksheet, fillable workbook, fillable pdf form tutorial, how to create a fillable pdf form, pdfescape link, pdf escape review, pdf form creator

Id: jugwEszqrU4

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 05 2023