Do you have multiple PDFs that you need to merge into one? Making one PDF out of many is easier than you might think on both Windows PCs and Macs. Here’s how to do it on each platform.
Knowing how to combine multiple PDFs into a single file is easy and can make you more productive. You don’t want to inflict a half-dozen PDF files on the accounting department, for example, when you can deliver one unified document. Or maybe you have four or five sections of a report that you’ve printed to separate PDFs from Word, Excel, and a photo editor. How do you get them all into a single file? These questions are all the more pressing for people working from home and those trying to go paperless because PDFs easily replace physical documents. People need to know how to organize and manage them. If you use a Mac, you have the only tool you’ll need already built into the macOS operating system. That said, you can find more flexible and full-featured solutions if you buy commercial third-party apps. If you use Windows, you need third-party apps—good thing there are a few free, open-source options that do the job. With any operating system, you can always use an online app that combines and edits uploaded PDFs, but I’m leery about using almost all of them. Some of these sites seem to have no viable business plan, and their PDF-editing services give them the ability to harvest the data in your files, including invisible metadata, that can potentially identify you and your system. You may not want to give that metadata to a site you don’t know anything about, and that site could profit from your data in ways you won’t like. I make one exception to this rule: Adobe’s free PDF-merge service. How to Combine PDFs in Windows When you need to combine PDF files in Windows, you might wish you had a Mac because the macOS-only Preview app gets the job done quickly and easily. Windows 10 lets you view PDF files in the Edge browser, but it doesn’t let you do anything with them. To merge or manage PDF files in Windows, you need either a free, but limited, third-party productivity app or one of the many well-designed commercial apps. PDFsam If your PDF-managing needs are minimal, install the free, open-source PDFsam. If you want the free Basic version, uncheck the option in the installer to download the Enhanced version, which is free to preview but costs $59 per year to keep. A spacious interface lets you choose among functions like merging and splitting PDFs files. Another nifty feature combines two PDF documents, alternating between pages from each file, so you can create a single PDF from separate PDFs that contain the front and back pages of an original two-sided document. Don’t expect an easy-to-use interface like the thumbnail views in Adobe Reader and other commercial software. With PDFsam, you merge two PDF files by dragging them into a window, which adds them to a list. You rearrange the list by dragging individual lines. You can specify a page range from each PDF, but you’ll have to figure out which pages you want by viewing the document in a separate app like Microsoft Edge or Adobe Reader. Fortunately, you can open PDFs directly from the file list in PDFsam. Optional features include the ability to add a blank page at the end of a PDF with an odd number of pages, so the next document in the merged PDF will begin on a right-hand page. You can also add a footer to every page of the merged document. Another feature allows you to merge bookmarks and form fields from the original files.
