How to Combine PDF Files

Do you have multiple PDFs 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 is 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 do not 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 will 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 a third-party app—and you are in luck because you can find free,
open-source options that can 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 do not know anything about and that typically conceals the country in
which it is based. Such a site could profit from your data in ways you would not like.

There is one important exception among online PDF-merging tools—Adobe's free PDF-merge
service. This is because Adobe is the most prominent player in the PDF world (having created the
format in 1991) and the company is open and transparent about its privacy policies.
How to Combine PDFs in Windows
Windows 11's default Edge web browser lets you view, draw on, and add text to PDFs, and it can
even read them aloud to you. But it cannot merge them on its own. To merge or manage PDF files in
Windows, you need either a browser extension or a separate third-party productivity app. Free but
limited options are available along with fuller-function commercial choices. We fill you in on the best
choices in both categories below.

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PDFsam

If your PDF-managing needs are minimal, install the free, open-source PDFsam. Start with the free
Basic version, and if you like it, consider buying a $69 annual subscription to the full-featured
Enhanced version, which lets you edit the contents of PDF files and convert them to other formats.
But the free version may be all you need.

The free version of PDFsam lacks some capabilities and ease-of-use features like Adobe Reader's
thumbnail views. But it does let 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 will have to figure out which pages you want by viewing the document in a
separate app like Edge or Adobe Reader. Fortunately, you can open PDFs directly from the file list in
PDFsam.

Another feature included in the free version is 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. The app also lets you merge
bookmarks and form fields from the original files. When you are ready to merge the PDFs, you just
click the Run button.

An especially nifty feature lets you combine two PDF documents, alternating between pages from
each file. This means that you can create a single PDF from two separate PDFs containing the front
and back pages of an original two-sided document. It took me a while to find this feature in the
interface, but I finally figured out that it is the one labeled “Alternate Mix.” Not the most intuitive name
for a feature, but it does work. PDFSam is available for macOS and Debian-based versions of Linux,
as well as for Windows.

PDF Merger & Splitter

An alternative freeware app available from the Microsoft Store is PDF Merger & Splitter, from a
company called AnywaySoft. PDF Merger & Splitter is a free Universal Windows Platform app
(commonly called a UWP app) that uses the open-source PDFsharp library for creating PDF files.

Compared with PDFsam, PDF Merger & Splitter gives you far fewer options and a less friendly
interface, but the app outdoes PDFsam in two ways: It lets you preview PDF files in its own interface,
and it can make all the PDFs you combine a single page size. PDFsam only lets you force all pages
to have the same size as the first page, while PDF Merger & Splitter also lets you force all pages to
have the same size as the largest page or the size used by the most pages. I strongly recommend
PDFsam, but PDF Merger & Splitter is worth having for this one feature.

PDF-Xchange Editor, ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat DC

If you want better visual cues when merging PDFs, you need a commercial app that lets you see the
combined PDF before you save it to disk and also displays thumbnail images so you can drag them
up and down in a sidebar and rearrange the pages. You can use almost any PDF-editing software,
such as the moderately priced PDF-Xchange Editor from Tracker Software. Better would be to
choose one of our Editor's Choice apps—ABBYY FineReader or Adobe Acrobat.

All these apps let you combine PDFs in basically the same way. Here is how you would do it in PDF-
XChange Editor:

 Go to File > New Document

 Choose the option to Combine Files into a Single PDF

 Drag the files that you want to combine into a single PDF into the file-list box. You can add a

variety of file types, including PDFs, text files, images, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

documents. The app converts all the files into PDF format before combining them.

When combining files, you can specify the page range of each file that you want to import. You can
fine-tune the combination by opening multiple files in separate tabs in PDF-XChange Editor and
dragging thumbnail images of the page you want from the source tab to the target tab. If thumbnails
are not visible, press Ctrl-T or use the View > Panes menu.

The process is very similar in both ABBYY Finereader and Adobe Acrobat.

How to Combine PDFs on a Mac

Unlike Windows, macOS has high-powered, built-in PDF tools, including the deceptively modest-
looking Preview app. In all recent macOS versions, starting with Catalina in 2019, the Finder also lets
you create or combine PDFs from a menu in its Gallery view (the view that displays a large preview of
the current file).

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From macOS Finder

To combine two or more PDFs in the macOS Finder:

 Switch to Gallery view from the Finder toolbar or the top-line View menu.

 Hold down the Command key and select the files you want to combine.

 Click each file in the order that you want the files to appear in the combined PDF. When you

select more than one file, a Create PDF button appears in the inspector panel at the right.

 Click Create PDF and the Finder will create a new PDF on your desktop, containing all the

PDFs you selected.

Alternatively, you can select multiple files in the Finder’s List View, then Ctrl-click or two-finger-tap to
bring up a context menu. Choose Quick Actions, then Create PDF.

Even better, you do not have to limit yourself to merging PDF files. You can select multiple images,
like PNG, TIFF, and JPEG files, in addition to existing PDFs, and use the same technique to combine
them into one PDF as well.

If the combined PDF file that you create from the Finder does not have its pages in the order that you
want, that is easy to fix. Double-click the PDF to open it in the Preview app. If thumbnails are not
visible in Preview's sidebar, go to the View menu to switch them on, and then drag the thumbnails up
and down the sidebar into the correct order.

Preview App

The Preview app offers the same PDF-combining powers as the Finder and can be easier to use for
complex tasks. To combine two or more PDF files in Preview, start by making a copy of one of the
files and working with the duplicate. This step is an essential precaution because Preview saves the
file as you work, and if the results are not what you want, you will need to do some fancy footwork to
get back the original file.

Open the duplicate file. Drag additional PDFs into the sidebar and drop them where you want them in
the file. You can move them to the start or end, or between any two existing pages. If you get the
location wrong, you can drag one or more thumbnails to the correct location, and you can delete any
pages that you do not want.

What if you only want to merge a few pages from a second PDF file? Open that file in another PDF
window and drag the thumbnails that you want into your first PDF file. As always in macOS, you can
Shift-click to select a continuous range of pages, or Cmd-click on multiple pages to select pages from
anywhere in the file. If some pages get imported in the wrong orientation, use Preview's toolbar to
rotate them.

Sometimes Preview acts in seemingly unpredictable ways when saving a file. So when you have the
combined pages arranged as you want them, choose File > Export to PDF and save the merged PDF
under its own name. You can also choose File > Close and follow the prompts to save the merged file
under the name of the file you started with, but it is safest to use the Export to PDF option.

Like the Finder, Preview lets you merge any file that Preview can display into an existing PDF. That
means you can include PNG, TIFF, JPEG, and other standard image formats. But what if you want to
create a PDF that contains a Word document or an Excel worksheet? You cannot drag those
documents into Preview, but you can print those files to PDFs using Word and Excel's Print menus.
The resulting PDFs can be used for a merge.

PDFsam and Other Third-Party Apps

If Preview does not provide all the features you need, you can use the impressive fine-tuning features
offered by the free open-source PDFSam app (mentioned in the section about merging PDFs in
Windows). PDFSam works the same way in macOS as it does in Windows.

Alternatively, if you have a commercial third-party app like Adobe Acrobat, you can merge PDFs in
the same way that you merge them in Preview. You can also directly drag files in any file format that
Acrobat knows how to convert into PDF, including HTML web pages, plain text files, Word
documents, and Excel worksheets. Additionally, Acrobat lets you create a completely new PDF from
one or more of these same external formats. Simply use the File > Create menu and follow the
prompts.

More PDF Tips

For other ways to convert a PDF into a Microsoft Word file, you can check out our guide. If you need
assistance making changes to your PDF once the documents have been combined, check out our
story on how to edit a PDF.