Add Your Signature to Your Letters

If you’re like me, you’re more likely to send letters in PDF format than on paper. You can add a personal touch to your letters by inserting a scanned image of your signature into your Word documents so that the signature will be baked into the PDF that Word exports for you to send to your correspondents. (See tip 15 below.) And you can automate the whole procedure.

Start by scanning an image of your signature written with a felt-tip pen on white paper. If you don’t have a scanner, your camera will get the job done, though not as easily. Use any photo editing app on your system to crop the image down so there isn’t a lot of white space around the signature. Now open a blank document in Word, and choose Insert > Picture and import the picture. Right-click on the picture and choose Format Picture. In the Format Picture pane, click on the right-hand icon (it will say Picture if you hover over it), and open the Picture Corrections menu. Here you may need to experiment. Start by changing Sharpness to 100%, Brightness to around 50%, and Contrast to around -40%. You’ll know you have it right when you see a clearly defined signature on a blank background. Drag one of the corners of the picture to scale it down to a size that will look right in your documents. Now right-click in your signature, choose Save as Picture, and save the image, preferably in PNG format, to a folder where you know you can always find it, typically your Pictures folder.

Next, write a letter, and when you get to “Sincerely yours,” press Enter, and do the following: In the Ribbon’s View tab, click Macros, then Record Macro. Give your macro a name like AddSignature and click OK. (You can ignore the Button and Keyboard options for now, or use them to add the macro to your Quick Access Toolbar or to a keystroke assignment.) Now start recording these actions: Go to the Ribbon’s Insert tab, choose Insert, Pictures, and Choose Picture from This Device. Navigate to the image that you saved earlier, and click Insert. Go to the View tab again, click Macros, and Stop Recording.

You can now perform that entire operation easily in any other document. Press Alt-F8 to bring up the Macros menu (or go to View > Macros > View Macros), select Add Signature, and press Run. If you ignored the Button and Keyboard icons in the Record Macro dialog, you can now assign a keyboard shortcut for the macro by customizing your keyboard as in tip 9 above. Choose Macros in the left-hand list of the Customize Keyboard dialog and your AddSignature macro from the right-hand list. Or, similarly, you can create a Quick Action Toolbar button for the macro, as in tip 6 above.

There’s one possible complication. You may want to type some text that overlaps your signature, and the text won’t appear if the signature image is formatted in Word’s default setting, “In Line with Text” (this option appears in the Layout Options menu that you can open by clicking the icon that appears to the upper-right of a selected picture). You want the signature to appear behind the text, but you probably don’t want to go through a lot of menus to format the picture “Behind Text.” You can’t record this option as part of your AddSignature macro, but you can add a command to the Quick Action Toolbar (see tip 6 above); under All Commands, find Send Behind Text, and add it to the toolbar. Now, If your image is hiding some text, just click on the image and on the “Send Behind Text” button on the toolbar to make things right.