Edit Free Printables Using PDFpen

Free printables are available online for every activity you can possibly imagine. Using PDFpen, you can customize them to your specific needs.

Health and personal development bloggers love them. TherapistAid, a website that provides therapists with free resources, has dozens available for free download. Coaches, educators, and consultants use them to support their clients in between sessions and collect information for their ongoing work. We're talking about free printables, worksheets designed to help people increase their self-awareness, develop new habits, track their progress, and get things done.

A printable is a digital file, usually a PDF, designed to help users monitor or keep a record of things on a daily, weekly, monthly, biannual, or annual basis. It's called a “printable” because it's meant to be printed and filled out by hand. Popular free printables online include:

• Household planners
• Monthly calendars
• Weekly planners
• Daily checklists
• Meal planners
• Fitness and health trackers
• Mood trackers
• Cleaning checklists
• Self-care sheets
• Saving trackers
• Budget planners

But a printable can also be a themed worksheet designed to guide users through a specific practice, such as performing a moon ritual; outlining a novel, managing anger, setting goals, or reflecting on the year ahead. Some complex practices—such as building a story—warrant entire workbooks.

Traditional printables such as cleaning checklists and meal planners are designed to help us save time. Using a template frees us from having to write the same things over and over again, which makes it easier (and more fun) to keep a record.

Worksheets also encourage us to remember and reflect on our daily experiences, a practice some researchers believe can help make us healthier, happier, and more likely to achieve our goals.

Finally, printables are great self-help tools.

For content creators, workbooks can be a way to generate extra income. According to Connor Whiteley, author of a self-publishing guide for writers, they are relatively easy to make and can sell well, especially when they deal with niche topics. “In my experience and especially in May 2020, I have had a good number of sales for my Forensic Psychology workbook,” he wrote. 

Downloaded a free printable that is almost exactly what you need, but not quite? Using PDFpen, you can edit it to make it your own. That’s what we did with the free printable below, courtesy of the blog Put The Kettle On. 

Here’s the original:

Free printable mood tracker by Put The Kettle On

Here’s the updated version:

Free printable sourced from Put The Kettle On and edited in PDFpen

Can you tell what’s different? Here’s the list of changes we made in PDFpen:

• Removed the flower image (Select - Delete)
• Updated “MOODS TRACKED” text to reflect the specific moods we want to track (Correct Text)
• Assigned colors to moods by coloring in the circles (Drawing Tools > Circle, Object Properties)

PDFpen is a powerful tool for making edits to PDF files, including free printables, worksheets, and workbooks. These edits can include text corrections, word replacements, text additions, and changes to images.

To modify a PDF file, you may need to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on it. (OCR is a PDFpen feature.) Once you make the PDF editable, you’ll be able to customize it to your needs.

Customize a printable today using PDFpen. Download a 30-day free trial.