How to Create a fillable PDF from scratch in Adobe Acrobat Pro (Windows/Mac)

hi everybody this is ian lamont from in 30 minutes guides today we'll be talking about creating a fillable pdf from an existing pdf using adobe acrobat pro if this video helps please take a moment to follow the channel and like the video and let's get started so i have a pdf it's a fillable pdf and when i say fillable it means that i can type into it so i can type my name here then i can hit the tab button to go to the next line so let's say i'm interviewing john smith i can put in the date so march 22nd 2022 i can and i can keep on going through and adding information and then once i'm done i can save it i can print it i can use it as an attachment to send to somebody else and this is how you create a form like this from a pdf that's not fillable and let me show you what i mean i have the original version of this pdf i'm going to open it in another program and you can see that this is not fillable i'm clicking around there's no fields or anything like that so i want to take this pdf and create form fields on each one of these lines using adobe acrobat pro and by the way this works on a mac or a windows machine i've tested in both i have adobe acrobat pro in both so let's get started and the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to make a copy of the original pdf i'm doing that in mac preview but you can also do it in windows explorer and so i'm going to say new fillable pdf okay then i'm going to open it up in adobe acrobat pro this is not the free home version that everybody has to read pdfs this is actually a software program you can use to create all kinds of neat things in a pdf including fillable forms and also edit the pdf which is another useful thing i've shown in another video so i've opened this up in adobe acrobat pro this is the same in windows or mac it'll look exactly the same let me just make that a little bit bigger and what you want to do is you want to see this kind of this tool set on the side if you don't see it go to view and then show hide tools pane that's what it is okay and then don't select the one that says fill in sign select the one that says prepare form i'm not going to be using signatures so and actually if you do choose signatures that opens up a huge uh ball of wax so to speak so let's not go there this is just a basic fillable pdf form click start and let's get going so i said so you can see already some tools have opened up here what you need to do first is go to the top row here and select the one that says add a text field and once you do that you can see as i move my mouse around this kind of floating text field appears if you press your mouse once the uh a box will appear and you can see it says text 22 and then i can just keep on going through and doing that and each click of the mouse will create a new field which is actually pretty convenient one other thing though that you should keep in mind is that of course i want these fields to go all the way to the right side of the page so i'm just going to move up to the top here and i click this arrow thing this is the selector tool and then if you click on the left side ruler and then kind of drag out you can see that blue line that appears that's called a guide and the great thing about these guides is that adobe acrobat and a lot of other adobe programs when you stretch stuff out it kind of snaps to them so they're all at the same point so i'm going to stretch that one out do the same for that do the same for that okay i can also keep on going and add some more fields so i'm going to select the text field creator again and it appears and this time what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold down on the with my mouse button and then drag to the right and then drag it out to that guide and do the same thing down here by the way if you have a double line answer where the they're not lined up like this you actually have to create two separate text boxes to handle that and i'm going to show you something with one of those one of the examples below which is a common situation okay so i'm going down dragging it out and it's actually you can see it's it's pretty basic to do this as long as the form is simple and this is a simple form i'm going to just drag this down a little bit so we can see i'm going to continue okay making it going further one other thing i'd like to draw your attention to on the right side of the page over here you can see that all these numbers are appearing and actually those numbers are important because it determines the tab order of your fields and when i say tab order it means when you press the tab button on your keyboard it will automatically advance to the next field and that's important when people are filling out information and they want to kind of quickly move around the document okay i'm almost done now i deliberately made a few mistakes here which i'm going to show you how to correct because that's pretty important for creating a good looking form and by the way this is for another company that i have which creates genealogy forms for people who are genealogists okay oh still a few more other notes so i'm going to just do that this one again and then for this one i'm going to do the second line but not the third line and i'll show you why in a minute okay so i'm going to press the selector arrow again so i get out of the the form creation sorry the field creation tool and let's take a look so one thing you'll notice if i click on something here i clicked on text 23 it's highlighted here the other thing that's worth noting is that you can actually change the names of the field so like i might i might change the name of text 22 whoops click on it here i'm going to change the name to your name and then text 23 i could do interviewee and so on i'm not going to do it for all of them but i just did it for those two the other thing that's important to notice is that i you can see that i missed a field i missed a field here so i'm just going to add one quickly but notice when i do that it appears at the bottom of the it appears at the very bottom of that particular list and you can see right now that this is text 28 and then it goes to text 42. if i was opening up this this uh fillable pdf in acrobat reader or another program and i hit tab actually it would jump from this field text 28 to text 29 because and the reason why is because text 42 this one is at the very bottom of the list so what i'm going to do is i'm going to actually drag that one up to text to right after text 28 and move it there so you can see it goes text 28 text 42. that means the tabbing the tabbing order will look okay all right there's a couple other things that i want to do here um one of them is you can see here uh text 41 i forgot to put in a field here a very easy way to take care of that is just to select it and then copy so if you're using windows that's ctrl c if you're using mac it's command c and then paste so windows would be control v mac would be command v or you can just go up here edit and then paste so you can see the field just this field just appeared so i'm just going to drag that down and put it right there okay one other thing before we test this particular form you'll notice that some of these forms i was kind of manually drawing them and other forms maybe i was a little bit sloppy in terms of the layout especially the alignment to the right you can kind of zoom in and try to microscopically adjust the sizes here by selecting them and moving them around but there's a much easier way to do it adobe actually has a very good tool for that and it's these tools up here the align center match size and distribute so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select all of these fields just by clicking dragging down and holding the mouse button all the way to the bottom and then letting go and you can see all of them are selected and then you can see it says match size so i'm this little button here means match height so if i click that that means all of the heights for these fields over here will be equalized to the same height so i'm just going to click that and um those are now all the same height i can also click the align button align right or a line left actually let's see what happens when i click a line left they're all going to they're all going to slide over to the left which doesn't which looks wrong so i'm going to undo that instead i'm going to select align right okay so now that all of those are lined up by the way this guide will not appear when you're printing out or testing it okay and i think that looks okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to preview it and see what happens so your name just put some dummy text in there full name of person being interviewed blah blah i'm hitting tab i'm going from field to field and you can see it it's working that's good okay but there's one other problem if i wanted to change the font size for these there's one other thing to do so let's go back to editing so what i'm going to do is let's say i just wanted to to have like your name that be a bigger font than all the ones below it so right right now they're all the same size so i'm gonna i'm gonna right click over your name select properties and you can see on appearance it already has 12 point helvetica so if i want to i can change that to 14 point helvetica maybe i can actually change it to another font like courier this is just for the sake of showing off okay let's go to preview take a look again and you can see it's currier it's a little bit bigger whereas this one is helvetica slightly smaller although it's hard to see the difference because i think 14 point courier and 12 point health editor is about the same size anyways once you are done with that what you want to do is you want to save a copy of this i suggest actually doing tests by creating new copies of the pdf and testing them out in different situations sometimes you may find things that are a little bit off like i can see there's a little gap here between this blue field and the black line below it the other thing to keep in mind is that when you actually print these pdfs out with text in them don't worry it will not have the the blue background on it and that's basically how you create a fillable form pdf and one other thing i recommend doing uh for the people who are opening up the pdf i strongly recommend using adobe acrobat it's kind of like the gold standard for fillable pdfs some other programs will open them up including i believe microsoft word and mac preview but sometimes the way that the text where it appears and some other settings may not be quite right they'll look it'll look a little bit off and i've had customers who've actually complained about that so now i always tell my customers whenever you're using one of these fillable pdfs please open it in adobe acrobat it's a free program the the basic version of adobe acrobat it used to be called adobe acrobat reader or adobe reader but that's what they should be using when they're typing into a fillable pdf this is the lamont from in 30 minutes guides if this video helped please take a moment to like it and follow me on youtube i have lots more videos about adobe and google drive microsoft word all kinds of stuff and i like helping out people and thank you so much for watching

Channel: In 30 Minutes

Views: 43,265

Keywords: how-to, help, video, dummies, for dummies, guide, book, step-by-step, tutorial, conversion, PDF, Adobe, Acrobat, fillable PDF

Id: oW4JXdr4Oao

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022