Google Doc Instead of a Fillable PDF in Canva

Mar 17

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Let’s chat today about about creating workbooks and documents for your business.

This can look like a course, workbooks or freebies. I know this is a super popular topic because it gets searched for all the time on my blog, mostly about how to make these workbooks fillable. Which is totally possible. Here’s the link to that blog tutorial for you in case you are looking for that.

Keep reading for more on why we've been kind of moving away from that.

Workbooks in courses

It’s a good move to add a written element to your courses. You can explain everything in a video, but some people need to see documents, they need to see workbooks, they want to read it, they want to work through it.

That's totally fine and awesome. I'm actually one of those people, I prefer to read instead of watch videos.

But what we’ve found over time, after doing tons and tons of fillable PDF workbooks, is they're so hard to update. They are not difficult to make fillable, but there is no guarantee that it's always going to work for everybody on every computer.

It also depends on if your customers know how to download the file correctly and if they are using their phone instead of a computer, because that's going to make a difference too.

workbooks in Google Docs

So we've just found that it's better to make the workbooks very simply in a Google Doc.

Even though it’s not as colorful and there aren’t as many fonts, it’s easier to organize and still allows your clients/customers to type their answers and notes directly in the doc.

You can put the doc workbook in your course already set up a make a copy. So your clients copy the document right into their own Google Drive and then they can write in it and it doesn't mess up your copy. Everybody gets a fresh copy every time.

But most importantly, if you need to update it, if your content's changed a little bit, you just want to take some stuff out, or rearrange it, it's much, much, much easier to update a Google Doc. With the PDF, you have to go back into Canva, rework your document, redownload it as a PDF, go back into Dochub, make it fillable again, redownload it again as a PDF, and then upload it again into your course and make sure everybody has the right copy.

With the Google Doc you could just pop into Google Drive and update it.

You would still need to let everybody know there’s a new copy and they would need to save it. But on the backend for sure, it's 99,000 times easier to just have it in a Google Doc that you can just pop in and update.

We've started switching all of our course workbooks over to this instead of PDFs, and it has just made things so much easier.

xx,
Delana

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