Unlike Windows, macOS comes
with high-powered PDF tools built-in provided by the macOS Finder and by the deceptively
modest looking Preview App. Starting with macOS Catalina, switch to gallery view
from the Finder toolbar or the top line view menu. Next, 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, the create PDF button appears
in the inspector panel at the right. Click on it. Containing all the PDFs that you selected. Even better, you can select
multiple images like PNG, TIFF, and JPEG files instead
of existing PDF files, and use the same technique to
combine them into PDF files. You can use the same method to combine image files and PDFs too. If the combined PDF file that
you created from the Finder doesn't have its pages in
the order that you want them, that's easy to fix. Simply double-click the PDF
to open it in the Preview App. If thumbnails aren't visible
in Preview's sidebar, go to the view menu to switch them on, and then drag the thumbnails
up and down the sidebar in the order that you want. 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 work with a duplicate. This is an essential precaution because Preview saves
the file as you work. And if the results aren't what you want, you'll need to do some fancy footwork to get back to the original file. Open the duplicate file. Next, simply drag additional
PDF files into the sidebar and drop them at the position in the file where you want them to be, at 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 don't 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 Command 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, then 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's safest to use
the export to PDF option. To find out more about merging PDFs involving other file types,
such as Excel, Word, and HTML, as well as combining PDFs on Windows, read the full article at PCMag.com.
