In addition to that convenience, document signatures can provide peace of mind, helping you add professional polish and security to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.
Why Use Signatures in Microsoft Office Documents?
But does this really matter? According to Microsoft’s help site, these signatures offer authentication, ensuring that:
The digital signature is valid. The certificate associated with the digital signature is current (not expired). The signing person or organization, known as the publisher, is trusted. The certificate associated with the digital signature is issued to the signing publisher by a reputable certificate authority (CA).
In this way, a document’s digital signature helps preserve the integrity of your document, both for yourself and those you share documents with. So, while you probably don’t need to sign every document you create in Microsoft Office, you can benefit from adding signatures to certain documents.
Here’s How
Click where you would like the signature then select Insert > Signature Line (Text group). The prompts will take you through the process of assigning a digital signature. A digital signature is a security layer. Under the same menu tool mentioned above, you will see an option to Add Signature Services, which you may decide you are interested in. You will next need to fill in details, in the Signature Setup dialog box. As you do, you will fill in information for the person who will sign the file, which may or may not be yourself. You will find fields for the party’s name, title, and contact information. Usually, it’s a good idea to show the signature date near the signature line. You can turn this feature on or off using the checkbox. Since the signer may not be you, it may be a good idea to leave signing instructions as well. You will see a field for custom text as well. Not only that, but you can allow signers to leave comments along with their signature. This can be a great way to avoid unnecessary back-and-forth since the person signing can simply stipulate any special terms their signature is conditional upon. This is done by checking the appropriate box.
