Electronic Signatures Made Simple!

Electronic and digital signatures are hot topics these days.  Not only for the convenience they provide in their use with electronic records, but for some of the legal issues they have raised when used for online transactions as well.

For this post, however, I’ll stay away from the legal discussions and laws concerning these signatures and focus on simply adding your signature to emails and internal company documents – stuff that won’t get you in trouble with the law!  You can read some of the legal definitions and differences between electronic and digital signatures on Wikipedia if you’d like more background.

Now, let’s get to some useful tips and tricks.  Perhaps you are like me and simply want to add your “cool” signature to your contact information in email.  Or maybe you want to be able to add your electronic signature to internal company documents rather than printing, signing and faxing/scanning them back to the recipient.  These are really simple tasks to complete using ScanSnap and the Adobe Acrobat software that comes bundled with the scanner.

There are a number of ways to capture your electronic signature using your ScanSnap, however, the one I find easiest for me is scanning to a JPEG.  Here’s what you need to do to get started.

First, sign a blank page.  Then scan the page and save it to a JPEG (if you want more info on how to do this, see the how-to on scanning to a JPEG).  You will need to change the ScanSnap setting to “Color” scanning and then click the “File Option” tab to save as a JPEG.  You may also need to scan at a higher resolution, which in ScanSnap terms means choosing the “Best” field under the “Scanning” tab and “Image Quality” section.

Once you have saved your signature to a JPEG, you might find that the size of your signature is much larger than your normal signature.  To edit the signature, copy it to Microsoft Paint and make any necessary size adjustments.  Once I’m satisfied with the look of my signature, I will copy and save it to an Excel file, but you can use whatever is easiest for you.

And that’s it!  You now have an electronic signature that you can add to any document or email.  Again, for legal reasons, it’s important to note that this is not a true digital signature, but rather an electronic signature.

I hope you found this helpful.  If you have additional questions, feel free to shoot them over in our “Ask the Expert” section.  If you want to explore creating a self-signed digital ID further, you can find a great step-by-step tutorial at AcrobatUsers.com.

Doug Cripps, Business Development Manager
Fujitsu Computer Products of America