How to Create and Use a Digital Signature to Sign a Word Doc.

How to Create and Use a Digital Signature to Sign a Word Doc.

Want to sign a doc and send it back to the sender without having to print it, sign it and fax it back? Here’s one solution.

1. Write you name on a piece of paper
2. Scan it and make a .bmp or .gif or .jpeg file. I use bmp. It's a photo file type
3. Put that file in you’re My Pictures folder where you can get it easily
4. When you need to sign a Word doc form:
1. Put your cursor where you want the signature to be.
2. Choose the Insert Menu, Picture, From File and that signature file you just made. Here’s mine:

5. Notice that you can resize it by grabbing the border handles when you click on the image but you cannot move the image easily.
6. Right –click on the image and choose Picture Format. If you don’t get that menu right away, move your cursor around the image until you can get that right-click menu item
7. Choose Layout and choose Tight. Now you can drag that image where you want it and resize it easily. The “handles” are now small circles instead of the boxes you first get when you click on an image in a Word doc.
8. Voila! You have a digitally signed document. Not the fancy, encrypted kind lawyers need, but one that will pass for most routine signatures on forms people send you.
9. In order to protect someone from copying your signature ands saving it for their uses, you can make the document into a pdf before you send it back to the sender. www.pdf995.com has free software to do that. That’s how I made this PDF. I use it every day. (People still can extract your signature if they want, but they have to be more clever.)

Blessings,

Bob Fox