Using Text Tagging in Microsoft Word

I’ll start by opening my Word document where you can see where I might want to place form fields when sending for a signature. To apply such fields to this document directly in Word, should we want to continue to maintain it here, we’re going to lever in text tags. Let’s provide a refresher of how text tags are structured. Here’s an example that demonstrates the syntax of a text tag. The first part of the field, address in this example, is the field name, es is the electronic signature identifier that will be applied to all text tags and will always come after the name of the field. The next part of the tag is separated by a colon that identifies the role of the participant order. Lastly, separated by another colon, you have the field type, which in this example the field type is signature. Finally, if you want to identify the field that’s required, you will include an asterisk at the beginning or an exclamation mark for a read-only field. Don’t worry, you’re not expected to memorize all of this. As you’ll see, this document can act as a guide with many examples that you can use as reference when applying text tags to your own. With that in mind, let’s return to my document where we’ll begin applying tags. Here, we have a field where we’ll be capturing input from our signer. We’ll start by opening the tag with two curly brace brackets required for all text tags, aside from when using in conjunction with Acrobat. Because we want to make this a required field, we’ll add an asterisk. From there, we’ll name the field, and I’ll name it text for now. We then need to include the identifier, which will always be the same, es. Finally, we separate the next section with a colon, which identifies the role, and in this case we want to assign it to signer1.

To complete the tag, I’m now going to close it off with two additional curly brace brackets. Let’s now do this for the next field on the document. But because it has similar properties, I can simply copy and paste the tag.

I do, however, need to give it a unique name. Otherwise, the field data will mirror that of other fields containing that same name, which is sometimes a desired effect when the same information is being collected more than once on a document. Okay, let’s scroll down now to the signature section of this document where we see signature, print name, and date. To begin, I’ll start with the signature field and open the tag with two curly brace brackets. I’ll name the filled sig, short for signature, followed by the es, separating the next section with a colon where I’ll identify the role, which is signer1. Finally, because this is a signature field, we need to give this field the necessary property to properly collect a signature. To confirm formatting for a signature field, we can go back to the documentation, where we see we need to add an additional colon, followed by signature, and then two curly brace brackets to close it off.

Let’s do the same for print name now.

To confirm the formatting needed to capture a full name, I can check the documentation, where we have an example of how to format our field.

And now we’ll go ahead and do the same for date.

Something else to keep in mind with text tags is the size of the fields, which is based on the size of the first curly brace bracket. Let’s use signature as the example and make it larger by increasing the font size of the opening curly brace brackets. And now when uploaded and sent, we’ll see how the fields are sized differently based on that.

Let’s now say we want to apply an additional field, perhaps a signature field that’s assigned to a second participant. I’ll simply copy and paste the signature field for signer1, and then change the one to a two so that it gets assigned to the second participant.

Now, while my document is ready to go, you might have other field types on your documents that I didn’t include in this example. Returning to the text tag guide, available on helpx.adobe.com, you can see that there are additional field types available, from checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down lists, and so on. This guide will act as a companion when using text tags to define form field placement on your Word documents and other text-based files. Returning to my document, we can now save and share this as a document template that we can continue to maintain in Word. If I need to make a change to the terms, no problem. I can remove section five of this document and the tags remain. Let’s now put our tags to the test and upload this document. I can send directly from where my documents are created and maintained, which is super convenient.

I’ll come to the top, and then on the right hand side I’ll see where my Word document was automatically attached. I’ll then start adding my participants. Ivanna Sign is the first signer, who will be assigned the fields that we assigned to signer1. I’ll then add myself as the second signer, who will be assigned the signature field we assigned to signer2. We can edit the agreement name, message, and then send this agreement for signature. But to check our work first, I’ll make sure preview and send is checked, and then hit continue. This will pop out a window that then shows us a preview of our document where we can see our tags have been successfully detected by Adobe Sign. Selecting edit shows the field assignment, the type of field, as well as the other properties given to this field.

Scrolling to the bottom, we can see the larger fields that we defined by sizing the curly brace brackets of the tag. And then right clicking on each will show us the type of field as well as other properties that we successfully defined in the tag using Microsoft work. We’re now ready to send this document for signature while we continue to use this Word document as the basis for our template. -