Hey everybody. Welcome back to the MacWhisperer academy. I'm Dylan Stewart, the MacWhisperer. And if you've ever gotten frustrated,
trying to figure out how to digitally sign a document, then
this lesson was made just for you. Let's hop on in and get started. Don't you hate it when somebody emails
you a document that you have to sign? You have to print it out
and then sign it by hand. And then what? Then what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to scan it back into
the computer or take a picture with it on your phone and text it to them. It's so frustrating and complicated. You would think by now there
would be an easier way to. And in truth, there is. Apple created a program called
Preview that has been a part of their operating system for years. It's the default program on your computer
that opens up both JPEGs and PDFs, and it can be amazingly valuable for editing
cropping or marking up image files. If you missed my walkthrough on
how to use preview for image files, click on the upper right corner
and go check out that lesson. In this lesson, we're going to focus
on how to use preview with PDFs. First off, let's hop over to the computer
where I've got a couple of PDF files waiting on my desktop for us to play with. We're going to start by double
clicking on this file here and opening it up in preview. Now that we've got that PDF opened, I want
you to notice the toolbar across the top. The first thing to pay attention
to is this little sidebar icon that you see in the upper left . Most
people don't know it's there at all. And it's one of the most valuable
parts of preview when you're dealing with multi page PDFs. Now, if your PDF is just one page long,
you don't really need to worry about this, but when you're dealing with a
document with more than one page in it, or hundreds of pages, this is critical. I'm going to go ahead and click
the carrot to the right side and select where it says thumbnails. And you'll see that sidebar open up
on the left with a small thumbnail of every single page of this document. The sidebar is so valuable because
right from the sidebar, you can reorganize the pages of a PDF like this. Simply click on any one of those pages
and move it to any other location. It's also really easy to delete
pages, right from the sidebar. All you have to do is click on any page
and hit the delete button on your keyboard like this and boom.That page is gone. The other thing that you can do with the
sidebar that's really helpful is you can add and import pages from other PDFs. All you have to do is take that
document, and in this case, we're going to look at this one-page document
that I have on the left side here and just drag it where you want it to go. Let's put this at the
top of this document. So I'm going to drag it in,
put it right into page 1 and release it and just like that. I can combine multiple PDF
documents into one larger PDF, just like you can do with Acrobat. Now to the right side of the toolbar. You're going to notice the zoom
out and zoom in buttons here. Let's go ahead and zoom in, or zoom out. To the right of the zoom in
and zoom out buttons you're going to notice our share icon. The share icon is always the easiest
way to send out any kind of document. It gives you options for emailing, for
text messaging, for airdropping, for adding a document into your notes program,
or even sharing it and collaborating on it with another apple user. To the right of that you'll
see the highlight tool. By clicking on the carrot to the right
of that you can choose what color. We're set on yellow right now. And anything that I select will
immediately get highlighted. You can even use the highlight
tool to add underlines or strike throughs to your document. If you need to, to the right of
that, we've got the rotate tool. The rotate tool is really helpful
if you scanned in a page and you accidentally scanned it in the wrong. For example, if we look over
to the thumbnails at the left, you'll notice that the document I
dragged into this PDF is sideways. That doesn't look right. We're we're, we're going to
need to fix that, but I don't have to rescan the document. All I have to do is select the page that's
turned the wrong way on the sidebar, on the left, and then click the rotate. Just like this and all of a sudden
I'm done and to the far right, you'll find the magnifying glass. This will allow you to search for
anything in the entire document. You can't underestimate how
valuable this tool is on a really, really, really long document. I mean, you might be looking for that
particular part of the contract that refers to your compensation, or in my
case, let's find everywhere in this document where the word men comes in. And if you look at the sidebar
on the left, you can see how many times it shows up on each page. In fact, on page one, it shows up twice. And if we zoom in a little. We can see that it's highlit
those two sections and on page two, it's shown up five times. We can see it all over the place. When you're done searching, you can
hit the little X in the far right side to cancel that search out and go
back to your document as it is now. If that was all that you could do with
preview, it would still be a pretty good program and probably enough for most
people, but you and I are not most people. So we're going to unlock the superpowers
of this app by clicking on the markup tool that we see on the far
right side here, clicking on this button, drops down a toolbar that
has almost limitless capabilities. On the far left we can select text
just like this so that we can copy and paste it into another document. Or right here I can redact sections of
this PDF easily in case there's sensitive or private information in there, just
click on it and drag straight across it. You can also use the
sketch or drawing tools. You see them right here
next to each other. That one's sketch. That one's drawing. When you use the sketch tool, it
will attempt to refine your drawing. So if I were to draw a star like this,
it would make it into a perfect star and using the formatting tools to the right
side of the markup toolbar, I can adjust the thickness of the lines or the color on
the inside or outside of those drawings. But when you use the drawing
tool, it doesn't correct it. It leaves it exactly as it is. So if I do a star. That's what I get... the star that I drew. Let's go ahead and remove these items from
the PDF to remove anything that you add. All I used to do is click on it and hit
the delete button and it'll disappear. And to the right of the sketch and
drawing tool, you'll find the shapes tool, which will allow you to add lines,
arrows, squares, circles, stars, all sorts of shapes that you might need to draw
attention to a particular part of this. On the lower left side of the
shapes tool, you can add something that will allow you to highlight a
particular section of the document. And you will also find a section that
will allow you to add a magnification to a particular part of the document. Using the blue dot you can make
the circle bigger or smaller. Using the green dot you can
adjust how much it's zoomed in. And to the right of that
you'll see the text tool. The text tool is super helpful, especially
for those PDFs that you're supposed to print out and fill out by hand. So let's close this document and open up a
form document that needs to be filled out. The first thing we want to do
is open up our markup tool bar here and click on our text tool. You'll notice that the text tool puts a
big text right in the middle of our page. We can easily change the size
and the format of that text by clicking on the text tool over
here and simply changing it. We're going to make that a whole lot
smaller and change the color to black. And now I can take that text and I can
drag it to wherever I needed to be. Once it's in the right position, I can
easily double click to select it and type in whatever I need it to say, if
you need to resize it, just grab the right or left side and drag it a little. And then you can position it
wherever you want it to be. And you can repeat this with any
parts of the form that you need to fill out, simply clicking the text
button, typing in what you needed to say, putting it in position and going
to the next spot on the document. And then to the right of that
is my favorite tool of all. And the one you've all been
waiting for, the signature tool. You see right here if you click on
the signature tool, you can insert a signature that you've already
created or create a fresh one. Now, if you've never created a signature,
this is super helpful because signatures created in preview synchronize across
all of your devices through iCloud. That means that if you use this function
on your computer, then once you've created that signature, you can easily
sign documents from your phone or iPad. There are several different ways you
can create a signature easily, right? From here, let's click the
create signature button and play around with them. The first option, if you have a
track pad, you can simply use that track pad to sign with your finger
like this, and then click done. And now I've got that signature. Or if you have an iPhone nearby, you
can click on the iPhone option and it will open up a page on your phone. That looks just like this. This will allow you to sign with
your finger from here, maybe a little easier than doing it on your track
pad and that signature gets added. But one of the easiest ways to add
your signature is to simply sign a piece of paper with your signature
click the create signature button and the camera button, and then hold it up
to your computer's cameras like this. And it will convert that signature
into a digital file for you and make it available on any of your devices. Once you've successfully created your
signature, you can add it to the documents very, very easily by selecting the
signature tool and the signature that you want, and then moving it into place. And if you need to enlarge it, you can
simply pull on the little blue balls here to make it the size you want to make it
and position it exactly where you want it. If you've made a lot of adjustments to
your PDF, I suggest saving a fresh version of it by coming to the file menu and
selecting where it says export as PDF. This will take all of your changes and
flatten them onto the document to make sure that anybody who gets this document
sees it with your additions, your changes, your signature, your markups, et cetera. So that's our lesson for today. Now, whether you're using
preview to just open a PDF. Or to create a PDF or merge multiple PDFs
into one larger document, whether you're using it to edit or mark up existing
documents or even using it to fill out and sign a form that somebody emailed
you that otherwise you'd have to print out, sign by hand and scan back in. Now that you understand the capabilities
of preview, you can do all of those things easier, faster, and simpler. If you liked this video and you got great
value out of it hit that like button. And if you haven't subscribed to
my channel yet, go ahead and take a moment, hit the subscribe button and the
notify bell, so that you'll always be alerted whenever I release new videos. I release videos weekly on apple
tips, tricks, tools, walkthroughs, and all sorts of other cool topics. I'm Dylan Stewart. They call me the MacWhisperer and
I can't wait to see you next time.
