One of the features that many Canva users have long been requesting is the ability to create fillable PDFs inside of Canva, whether that’s a checklist, or a worksheet or some other form of PDF design that you’d like to make more interactive.
Making checkboxes or worksheet sections fillable isn’t a feature that Canva offers at this time, though I am still holding out hope that it will be possible in the future.
In the meantime though, I want to show you my favourite tool to use online in order to turn your beautiful Canva PDFs into a fillable document.
Resources Mentioned
Transcript
I’ve used both Adobe and PDF Escape in the past to make PDFs fillable, but my preferred option these days is DocFly.
Note that DocFly does have a free tier but free users are limited to just 3 credits every month, meaning you can only export up to 3 files per month, whereas paid accounts have unrestricted access to export PDFs.
So let me walk you through how to use this.
And note that this tutorial assumes you already have your document designed in Canva and downloaded as a PDF, ready to make fillable.
You’ll start by going to DocFly.com.
I can drag and drop my file directly into the space provided here, or I can click on the green button to upload my file by browsing my computer, finding the file and uploading it that way.
I’m simply going to drag my PDF file directly into the space here and then we’ll wait for it to upload.
When it’s done uploading, I can then click on that file to open it up in editing mode.
It will take me to the PDF editor page and you will see that it has automatically put me on this editor tab at the top. You will want to change that to the form creator tab in order to make fillable check boxes.
Then, to add your check box fields, you will click on the checkbox field icon at the top of the page. When you do that, you’ll be able to change the style of the check box, for example if you want to change it from a check to a cross or a star you can do that.
You can also change the size of the check, and I’m going to change it to 18 points… and you can change the colour of the text checkmark, including the ability to specify your hex color value here.
When you have checkbox field selected, you will see that your cursor changes to a little crosshairs with a checkbox attached to it to indicate that you have the checkbox option selected.
You’re going to click that checkbox wherever you want to add a checkmark, and if you want to move the check location, you can use the little arrow, like this. Or if you want to delete the check, you can click on the trash icon.
And then you’ll add as many checkboxes as you need.
Now let’s do one of the worksheet pages, and you’ll see that the process is similar, except now instead of choosing the checkbox field, I will select the paragraph field option.
Once that is selected, I can click in the box area that I want to make fillable. It will add a box which I can resize as needed by pulling on the corners like this.
You’ll see that you can change the font being used and you have a small selection of fonts to choose from…
You can also change the font size…
And you can change the font color.
There are also a variety of other field types that you can select from, including text fields, radio fields, dropdown fields, and more.
When you are ready to download your PDF, you can click on the green save button at the top, and then you can click on the purple export button, and choose to download your document.
And now when I open that PDF, I can see it has now made those fields fillable.
