Combine or split PDF documents

One of Adobe Acrobat's superpowers is the ability to combine or split documents, making it a seamless process to merge or separate PDF pages.

Hi there!

My name is Angelo Montilla from www.montilladesign.com.

I'm an Adobe Certified Designer, Trainer and YouTube Content Creator.

In this video tutorial, you'll learn how to use the Combine files tool to merge multiple files into a single PDF.

I'll also show you how to use the Split option to separate pages into two or more PDF documents.

Let's get started.

I have two separate documents for a social media campaign that I would like to combine.

The first PDF has three square size social media posts, and the second PDF has three wide social media posts.

Let's merge them together.

In the All tools panel, click on Combine files.

Next, click on Add Files and choose the PDF documents you would like to merge together.

In this case, I have Britton Eyewear Social Media - Wide.pdf and Social Media - Square.pdf.

I could click Add Files, but because I have both of these already open, I'm going to click Add Open Files, and you can see that they're listed here, both the Wide and Square versions, and then I'm just going to simply click Add Files.

You can review the files by clicking the Expand button to see that all three have been added for the Square version, and the same can be said for the Wide version.

All three are there.

Once you're happy with your selections, you can go ahead and combine the files together by clicking Combine.

And you'll see now, if I open the page thumbnail for you, that all the pages in this social media campaign are all merged into one PDF document.

Now, when you're combining files in Acrobat, you're not limited to PDF documents only.

We can use the same technique to combine a PDF along with any other compatible file, such as a Word document.

Let's do that next.

I'm going to click on the Combine files tool again, and this time I'm going to choose Add Files, so I can choose them from my computer.

I'm going to click Britton Eyewear Social Media - Wide.pdf, hold the Command key on a Mac or the Control key on Windows and click the Square version.

I'm also going to select a Word document.

I have a Social Media Strategy Word doc to go along with these posts, so I'll Command or Control-click on the Word document to select that as well, and then click Add Files.

And you can see that it adds my Square version, the Wide version as well as this Word document now, which is just text to go along with the social media posts.

Once you have all the files that you want, go ahead and click Combine.

Once again that combines all the files into one PDF document, and you can see that if I scroll down in the page thumbnails panel, all the pages that have merged together are now in one document.

Now that's how you Combine files.

But what if I wanted to split pages into different documents?

Let's do that next.

I have a master document with eight pages, which I'd like to split into two separate files.

To do that, I'll choose the Organize pages tool in the All tools panel.

And here you can see that all eight pages in this document are previewed in the Organize pages tool.

Under Page Options, let's click Split.

That will display a pop-up with additional options.

In the Split by dropdown options I'll leave the setting at Number of pages.

However, you can also Split by File Size as well as Top level bookmarks.

I'll enter 6 in the Pages field.

Next, I'll click on Output options to display a dialog for additional settings that control how the split documents will be saved.

First, you'll have to choose a Target Folder.

By default, it'll be set to The Same Folder Selected at Start.

However, I am choosing A Folder on My Computer.

If I click Choose, you'll see I have a folder called Split Docs.

I'm going to click Choose and that's where my split documents will be saved.

You can Add a label and number before original name, or Add label and number after original name.

I'm going to choose the latter.

You can leave the label name to the default setting.

I'm going to change mine to Version.

The separator between the original name and the label is just a underscore.

And then we don't want to overwrite the existing files.

I'm going to click OK.

And then I'm going to click Split.

You'll see a message that the document has been split into two documents.

I'm going to click OK, and I'll open a Finder window.

If I open my Finder window here in my Split Docs folder, I have a Version1 with all six of my social media posts, and Version2 with my Britton Eyewear Social Media Strategy.

You're now ready to combine documents and split PDFs into separate files.

Give these techniques a try with your own projects and see how easy it is to take control of your PDFs in Acrobat.

Again, my name is Angelo Montilla, and I'll see you in the next video.