Easily Split And Merge PDF Files With This Easy Tool

I am a lifelong fan of Adobe PDF files but I am unwilling to pay a minimum $300 for Adobe Acrobat. I would much rather look around for free open-source alternatives and today I found a nice little software tool that allows you to take a PDF file and split it up into lots of little PDF files as well as merge lots of PDF files together. It’s called PDF Split and Merge. Just what I was looking for!

Plus if you’re willing to donate a minimum of $1 to the developer, he’ll throw in the enhanced version of the software which will give you the ability to encrypt your files as well.

But for most people, including me, the basic free version will suffice. Let’s take a look at it and see how easy it is to split and merge your PDF documents. Let’s start with merging a file.

After installing the software, open it up and click on “merge / extract” on the left hand side. Then on the right hand side, click on “add”. This will allow you to add the PDF files you want to merge, to the program.

If there is a password for the PDF file, add it in the “password” column. If you only want certain pages from the file to be merged, put the page numbers in the “page selection” column (such as 1-5, 12, 14).

The next step is to complete this part :

As you can see, if the PDF file has forms, tick the box. Then indicate the folder where you want the newly merged file to go on your computer in the “destination output file” box. Then click the “run” button. Your merged file should then be made for you in less than a minute or so depending on the size of the files.

Now, to extract pages from a PDF file is also dead simple. Just go through the previous process again but this time, choose only one PDF file. Then in the page selection column, choose the pages you want to extract. Then press the “run” button. Your pages will be extracted as a single PDF file in literally seconds.

The third option is to take a PDF file and split it all the pages up :

You can also choose to give each new PDF file a prefix such as the name of the original file so you can keep track of which pages belong to which file.

All in all, this is a pretty powerful free tool and it gives you one more reason not to shell out the money for Adobe Acrobat. This is definately going in my “keeper” folder and I am contemplating giving a donation to the developer to try out the encryption feature.

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(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger, professional freelance writer and the editor of Make Use Of. Check out his personal blog at BetterThanTherapy.net