**Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
PDF (Portable Document Format) files are very common for many types of documents, forms, letters and so on. You can create PDF files from other types of files such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and even from graphics applications. Many programs allow you to export your work to a PDF file and Microsoft Windows even has a built in PDF printer that lets you print just about any file to a PDF file.
Once you create a PDF file, it can be difficult to edit it unless you have some software designed to edit PDF files. One common task that many people need to perform is to combine multiple PDF files into a single PDF file. In this article, we will be showing you how to do his with the free PDF Arranger software.
PDF Arranger comes in an installable version as well as a portable\standalone version and can be downloaded here.
For our example, we will be combining three PDF files into one single PDF file. The image below shows the files that we will be working with.
Once you open the PDF Arranger app, you will see that it’s a fairly simple program and you can begin by adding your PDF files to the app. You can drag and drop your files into the main window to begin. There are also open and import buttons at the upper left that you can use to add your PDF files to the application.
The image below shows how things will look after you import or add your PDF files to PDF Arranger. As you can see, two of the documents are one page each while the third document consists of three pages.
Once you have your PDF files imported into the app, you can right click on any page, and you will have several options to choose from. You can do things such as delete a specific page, rotate it, duplicate it, resize it and also add a blank page. You can also drag and drop the pages around to change their order.
At the upper right corner of PDF Arranger, there is an icon you can click on to see additional settings for the app.
Once you have your PDF files imported into the app and have them organized the way you like, you can then either export them to a single PDF file or save them as a single PDF file. When you choose the export option, you have three choices as to how they will be exported.
- Export selection to a single file – This will export any pages that you have highlighted to a single file.
- Export selection to individual files – This will export any pages that you have highlighted to individual files with each page being its own file. So, if you imported a single five page PDF file into PDF Arranger, you could have each page exported to its own file.
- Export all pages to individual files – This will export all the pages from all the files into their own files with one page per file without having to select them first.
The Save and Save all options can be used to save all the pages to a single file which is like the Export selection to a single file option, but you do not need to select the individual pages first.
Once you choose your export or save option, you will need to name your new file or files and then choose a location on your computer to save them to. If you choose one of the options that will create multiple files, you can give it a name and it will name all the files with the same name but put numbers after the name as seen in the image below.
Here are some additional resources you can use to combine multiple PDF files into a single PDF file.
For additional training resources, check out our online IT training courses.
Check out our extensive IT book series.
