How To Merge PDF Files On Your Mac

hi this is Gary with mmos.com let me show you how you can merge PDF files on your [Music] Mac MMOs is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2,000 supporters go to mmos.com patreon there you can read more about it join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so a common Question Mac users have is how to merge two or more PDF files into a single file and it's actually really easy to do but you've got more options if you want to do something more specific so if you just want to take two files and just create one PDF from them it's actually pretty easy and you don't need any software at all you can just do it in the finder this is using Mac OS Sonoma so make sure you've got the most recent version of Mac OS and then select the files you want here I've got a file called newsletter.pdf if I hit the space bar just for quick look I can see it's just got two pages in here it's just a sample newsletter here's another one called report.pdf it's also just got two pages here these are just Pages templates that have exported as PDFs as examples let's say I wanted to merge these into one PDF what I could do is select one and then select the other you could do that by using shift and clicking and that will select a range but also you could do it with command click and that could select a file that's not contiguous like that so once you've got the file selected that you want to merge then you want to bring up the context menu now you can do that using control click or two finger click on a trackpad right click on a mouse just do that with one of the files that's already selected and then it brings up the context menu and look for quick actions and one of the quick actions you should see maybe the only one is create PDF so let's select that and that will create a new PDF using the name of the first one that was selected and appending a number to it we can rename it now to something else so I call it merged and now if I use quick look to view the PDF I could see it's got the two pages from that first document and the two pages from the second document all wrapped up in one single PDF file now there are other ways to get to that create PDF function if you don't want to use the context menu one way is if you go to view and then Show preview and you could bring up the preview here in any view in finder it's usually there in the column view by default but you can bring it up in list View and icon view as well and then at the bottom you're going to see quick actions like create PDF there's not much room here for many quick actions so if you have other ones it might push create PDF off the list but if you click more and customize then it will take you to system settings and you can see checks next to all of the items that are there in quick actions now you can click and drag one to the top to give it Priority you could also check and uncheck which ones you want notice these are all checked but they weren't showing up because they're all for images so since we didn't have an image file we didn't have things like like convert image markup rotate left and trim which is for video files uh there we just saw create PDF so it didn't really matter but once you've got that set up you can use create PDF right here and it will do it for you instead of bringing up the context menu so you could also use this for merging more than two PDFs so I can select these two but also say this one here which is three pages of text so let's go and do that I'm going to use the command key to select all three and when I use any method to activate create PDF like that then I get this file here and if I look at it now I could see it's got all of the pages from all three files and note that order is important if I select this file first and then this file and then this one it's going to merge them in that order so now when I click the button you can see it's using the name from the first one selected and when I click look I can see it has the document with three text Pages first and then the report and then the newsletter Now using a quick action inside of the finder is the fastest way to merge PDFs but if you want something more specific a little more control over things then you can use preview instead so let's open this up in preview you can double click it if preview is your default app for opening up PDFs and by default that's how it should be set up on your Mac however if you've used another app and that's taken over as the default app you can control click on it and say open with and then preview so in order to actually merge files you need to be able to see the thumbnails to the left so click on this little icon here and choose thumbnails or alternatively choose View and then thumbnails and you're going see the thumbnails here you see all the different pages so now you can add another PDF to this using the plus button at the bottom left and you can see you can insert page from a file now before we actually do that let's realize what we're doing here we've opened up newsletter.pdf if we insert another page we're actually adding to newsletter PDF you may not want to do that you may want to leave newsletter.pdf alone and create a new file that merges various PDF files so the ways to do that are many you can for instance select a file here and then in the finder go to duplicate and it creates a new one so we can rename this one merged I'm going to show you more ways to do this in a minute but for now we've created this new PDF that's a copy of the newsletter.pdf file that's great this is the one we're going to merge into so I'm going to double click on it to open it up in preview I'm going to click the plus button and choose insert page from file and then I want to go and add report to this one so I'm going to select open and you can see it actually Imports the pages from that document into this one but notice where it put them it put them between page one and page two of the newsletter so let's undo there and instead let's get more specific and show it exactly where we want to insert we're going to select page two indicating we want to insert after page two instead of page one or the default indicating we want to insert after page one so now when we insert page from file and we select report we get the two new pages added at the end and I can continue to add pages and I can select the last page here and continue to insert other documents as well or if I decide I want to insert one between these two I could select page two and it will insert Pages between two and three but notice that you could also use the thumbnails here to drag things around so I could select this page here and drag it up for instance and put it at the top or let me undo that and I can select this one and command click to select these two pages and drag up to the top here and change the order so preview allows you to organize the pages after you brought together multiple documents but you could also use the same technique between two different PDF files so let's do what we did before and create a copy of newsletter.pdf I'm going to use file duplicate notice command D is the shortcut there Chang this to merged now I'm going to double click to open this second file report.pdf I can actually go to the thumbnails in report.pdf and drag one or both I'm going to command click to select both drag it over to the first document here and I could place it exactly where I want so I'll place it here at the end so you can see by just dragging and dropping from one to the other I can merge two documents and I didn't have to select both Pages here I could have selected just one and brought that in to this document so it gives you a lot more control over exactly what's being merged and where now the weird step here is duplicating the file before you actually do the merge so you're not changing the original file but there are other ways to handle that like for instance we can double click on newsletter.pdf to open it up so I'm now looking at the original but now I can go to file and I could do duplicate and this creates a second copy here so now I can work with this copy and I can actually close this one so you can duplicate the file inside the app another way to do it is to open up the original document go to file and hold the option key down and duplicate changes to save as so now you can select a new name for this like that and you've only ever had the one window open notice I've got the original there sitting all by itself it's not opened and we're not going to be changing it and this new one and I can now go and add to this new one or I can open another document and drag and drop pages into it a third way to do this comes in handy if you don't want to use all the pages from the original document so let's go into newsletter.pdf here and let's say I just want to use the first page from this one and merge it with some others I can select this first page and copy command C then I can go to file and say new from clipboard this creates a new Untitled document and I can see here I've just got that first page you could even select multiple pages so if this had 10 pages I could have selected page one four and six and then copied those and said new from clipboard so now I've got this Untitled unsaved document and I can proceed to insert new pages from other documents or open other documents and drag and drop pages into it I like this technique is it feels kind of natural after you've done it once or twice and remember you don't have to go and scroll through to select all the pag P if you have a 100 page document you could simply select one of the pages and use command a to select all of them and then command C for copy and then a Quick Command n for new from clipboard and now you've got an Untitled unsaved document that has all those pages in it ready to merge some new pages in plus I know I'm going to get some people asking about what about splitting documents you don't want to merge them you just want to separate pages well this technique works for that as well if you just wanted to have a document with page two you can select page two here and then command C to copy command n for a new document and now you've got a document with a single page in it ready to save out and you could do that with multiple Pages as well and continue to go back to the original document copy pages from it command and to create new from the clipboard and you can see how now I've got these two new Untitled documents here so you can use all of this to split PDFs as well as to merge them so there are whole bunch of different ways to merge and manipulate the pages in p PDFs from very simple to a little more complex but with a lot more flexibility I hope you found this useful thanks for [Music] watching if you like this video click the Thumbs Up Button below to let me know I published new tutorials each weekday hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss out

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 25,663

Keywords: merge pdf files into one mac, merge pdf mac, combine pdfs, combine pdf files, combine pdf files into one mac, combine pdfs on mac

Id: cKhTaPEqNDI

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024