This past weekend, I finally implemented Mike Vardy’s excellent 1Password Emergency Kit so that if I get hit by a bus, my wife will know how to get into all our stuff.
Mike’s kit is a helpful PDF form, but since I have the handwriting of a four year old, I prefer to type it. Unfortunately, this PDF is not a fillable PDF, so I fired up Nitro Pro 9 for Windows to fill it out.
Just open up the PDF in Nitro and hit the Forms tab at the top.
Then hit the Text Field button and you can either draw the text field wherever you want to enter text, or double-click on the form.
If you need to, you can adjust the look of the text field by adjusting the Properties tab under Form Tools.
Rinse and repeat for each field you want to add to the form. It doesn’t have to be just text boxes. You can add check boxes and any other type of form element you’d like.
Once you get started, it goes pretty quickly.
Hit the Select tool on the left, and now you can go through and fill out your fancy new form fields.
You can then save the PDF or print it out.
In case you are reading this, it would be awesome to have a feature similar to Create Form Fields For Page in PDFpen Pro for the Mac. It goes through a document and automatically creates form fields where it detects them on the page. It is pretty awesome.
In the meantime, if you want to know more about creating forms in Nitro, they put together this handy video.
I like to fill out forms on my computer whenever possible. If they’re not already a fillable PDF, it is easy to make them that way with something like Nitro on Windows or PDFpen on the Mac. Do you fill out forms on your computer? How do you do it?
