Overview
Traineaze comes with a default Certificate of Completion that you can award to your learners upon finishing a course.
In addition to the default certificate, you can also use your own Certificate of Completion - incorporating your own logo, fonts, colors, etc. Custom certificates are PDF files and can include dynamic form fields, enabling each certificate to be personalized to the learner. This guide will show you how to create your own certificate.
Types of Certificates
There are two types of certificates that can be added to the system:
- Company Wide Certificates - When you add a certificate under Company Settings->Course Settings, the certificate is available to use in any course.
- Course Specific Certificates - If you add a certificate to a specific course (under Settings for the course), then that certificate is available only to that course.
Creating a Custom Certificate
To create a custom certificate, you will need a PDF creator. It's best to use a PDF tool that supports form fields so the certificate can be personalized to the learner. Don't worry, we will explain how this works later in the tutorial.
In this example we use PowerPoint to design our basic certificate, and then we use CutePDF to add the form fields. You can download a trial version of CutePDF here.
PowerPoint comes with some basic certificates, which gives us a jump start on our design. You could also design your certificate in Adobe, Word, or any other tool that allows you to "Save As" a PDF.
1. Open PowerPoint and click File->New.
2. In the search box at the top of the screen, type Certificate and press Enter.
3. You should see several certificates. Select one.
4. Remove any text that you want Traineaze to fill in automatically at run time. For example, if you want Traineaze to automatically insert the learner's name, then you need to replace the hard coded name with a dynamic form field. For now, simply remove the name text. We will later use CutePDF to insert a dynamic Form Field called "name" that Traineaze will recognize and insert the learner's name at run time.
Note: The dynamic fields available to use in your certificate are:
- name - The person's name.
- course - The course name.
- date - The date of completion.
- score - The score the person received for the course.
5. Continue to design your certificate by adding your logo, signature, or anything else you want to add. In the image below, you can see the text we want to replace at runtime has been removed, and we added images for our logo and signature.
6. Once you are done designing your certificate, click File->Save As and then click Browse.
7. From the "Save as Type" dropdown, select ".PDF".
8. Click Save.
Adding the Dynamic Form Fields
Dynamic form fields act as a "placeholder" for text that gets inserted when the certificate is requested by an individual.
The dynamic form fields available to use in your certificate are:
- name - The person's name.
- course - The course name.
- date - The date of completion.
- score - The person's score for the course.
The field name is case-sensitive, so be sure to use all lowercase when adding your form field.
In this example, we used PowerPoint to create our basic certificate. While PowerPoint gave us a quick start in designing our certificate, it does not allow you to add PDF form fields. For this we will use our PDF tool, CutePDF.
Note: If the tool you use to do your certificate design supports adding PDF form fields, then you can do both the design and add form fields all in the same tool.
1. Open CutePDF and load the PDF you designed in PowerPoint above.
2. Click the Form Editing button at the top of the screen.
3. We are going to add a text placeholder for the person's name. Once in form editing mode, click the Text Field button at the top of the screen.
4. Move your mouse to the place on the certificate you want the person's name to be displayed and click and drag to create a text box. Make sure to make the text box large enough to hold a person's name.
5. In the text field properties window that appears, enter "name" (without the quotes and in all lowercase) for the Name property. You will probably also want to uncheck Border Color and Background Color.
6. While the text field properties window is still open, click the Options tab. Change the alignment to Center.
Note: Feel free to play around with these properties. You can change the font, color, etc.
7. Click the OK button.
8. Repeat steps 3-7 for the course and date fields. Make sure to name each field accordingly. Here is a screenshot with all 3 fields defined.
9. Once all your form fields have been defined, click the Back To Viewer button at the top of the screen.
10. Test your certificate to see what it will look like by clicking in your form fields and entering text. If you aren't happy with how your form fields look with text in them, click the Form Editing button again and make your changes. Here is the certificate with sample text in the form fields. Note: I did go back and change the font to Helvetica instead of Helvetica-Bold.
11. Once you are happy with your certificate, click the Save button.
12. Congratulations, your certificate is now complete and can be uploaded to Traineaze.
Additional
How to Upload a Custom Certificate to Traineaze
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