How To Create a Single PDF From Multiple Documents On a Mac

You don't have to create a document all at once in a single app. You can take different documents from different apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, web reports, images and more, and combine them into a single PDF using Preview. This allows you to create pages of your document in the app best suited for that content.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to combine documents from different apps into a single PDF.
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Say you have a document in Pages but you also have a table or chart in Numbers and maybe some images from somewhere else and you want to have a single document. A single PDF that then you could distribute or send to somebody. Well, you can combine PDF's pretty easily. You don't have to do it using the apps that you're creating these documents in. You can keep all of the documents in separate apps and then you can export them as PDF's, and merge them together to create your final document.
As an example here I have a bunch of different documents using different apps. Let's start with this report here in Pages. So this is a two page report and this is going to make a part of my final PDF. So in Pages here I'm going to go to File, Export To, PDF and I'm going to export this out and save it in the same location but it will have dot PDF after it instead of dot Pages. We also have a longer text report here in Pages. Let's export that out as well. Now I have a Numbers document. This actually has two different sheets in it. So I'm going to end up with two different pages here. Let's export to PDF and if I look at that PDF here you could see it has got two pages in it. One from each sheet.I also have a Keynote document. It's an organizational chart just on a single slide. So let's export this as PDF.
Now if I'm worried about how this is going to appear on the PDF I could always, instead of choosing Export To PDF, go to Print and then from there I could see a preview of what it would look like. Then use PDF, Save As PDF here. 
Let's say in addition to those documents I've got something on the web, maybe a report that's generated, that I want to include in my PDF. As a stand-in for that I'll just use this page of US Census data. So here in Safari I can export this page as PDF and save that out to the same location.
Alright. So let's start combining these. Now let's assume that I want to keep all the individual PDF's around. So I'll start by taking one of these, say the very first one, and make a duplicate of it. That will be the file that we're going to create. So here it is created and it's just called the Graphic Report Copy. I'm going to hit Return and rename it as Combo Report and then I'm going to double click it to open it up in Preview. So we're to use Preview to combine these documents. 
Let's shrink this window down a bit. I can move it over here to the right. Now I've got in this new document here the two pages from the Combo Report. I want to go and add some things to it. Let's start by adding one of those pages from the Numbers document. Open up that PDF here and let's shrink that window a bit so we could see both, kind of, at the same time. I could select anyone of the pages here on the left. If you don't see the left sidebar you can go here and choose Thumbnails. I could drag this and I could put it anywhere I want in here. I can put it before the first page, in-between these two, or let's put it here after page two. Now we have page one, two, and three even though the numbering doesn't show that here.
Let's close that and let's go and grab that long report. Double click on that and I'm going to grab all the pages here. So I'll select the first one, go to the bottom, Shift click to select all five. Then I'm going to drag all of them here to the bottom. Now you could see it has added five pages here. Now let's go grab that other page from the Numbers document. Select it here. Let me drag it over and I'll scroll to the end here and drop it after the last one. Let's grab that Keynote organizational chart. So I'll go into that. I have to show the thumbnails on this one. There it is. Shrink this down and I will drag it here to the end. 
Finally, there's all of that census data in here. It's a fairly big document but it's a single page. So I'm going to select all of that here and, you know what I'm going to do? I don't really want all of this extra stuff here. So I'm going to use the Markup Tools. Do a selection there and I'm going to just draw a box around the part that I want. Then I'm going to crop, like that, click OK. Now I'm going to drag and drop this to the end of this document here. You can see that's exactly what I get.
So now here's my document as a PDF. I could save this. Now would be a good idea. I've got these two pages. I've got this one. I've got all these different ones here all as a part of a single document. I can move things around. So say if this organizational chart needs to come earlier I can drag it up and put it above here. I can move all these around as individual pages. Notice that some of these pages are horizontal and some of them are vertical. The PDF doesn't care. It will have all of those. It's not great for printing but if the idea here is to distribute a PDF and be paperless then there's no reason you can't combine different page sizes inside of a single PDF document.
The one thing we're missing is a cover page. We've got one of those here too. I've got a coversheet. Let's open that in Pages and export that to PDF. Let's put that at the very beginning. Now since I want the whole document and I don't need to preview it, I don't need to open it up inside of Preview. I can just drag the PDF right into here and it will add it. So in a lot of cases that might be easier. If you have a bunch of PDF's and you just want to put them all in in the order that they appear you can just drag and drop them into the sidebar here without opening them up in Preview first.
Now let's save this document. You could see here I still have the weird page numbering. It recognizes this as page one, then this is page one and two, then one, then one through five. It kind of keeps the page numbers that were originally for each page when they were in their own documents. But if I close this and open it up again in here you could see now it has renumbered everything. Those numbers are kind of nice because now they see things a little bit clearer when you're compiling the document. But in the end they're just really in this one long big document now that's a PDF from five different documents. 
You can keep adding to it. I don't have to do this all at once. So I have this Combo Report open and let's add something else. Let's say we wanted to add an image. So you don't have to convert it to a PDF first. Just by adding it here to the list it'll add it as a page in PDF. So I can drag and image, just any format will do, from here and it adds it as its own page. Now that is part of the PDF's. I can save here and close the document. If I reopen it you can see it's there just as a page on the PDF that just happens to have that one image there.
Another way you could bring documents in is to go to Edit, Insert, then Page from File. So I can grab a page, let's grab this org chart here. You could see I've started over again and it inserted that file in-between these. So let me Undo that and go to page two. The great thing about using Insert Page From File, it seems like it's a longer process, but you can select multiple files. So let's grab the Breakeven analysis. I'm going to hold the Command key down. Grab the Coversheet. Grab the long report and the org chart and the census data. Then Open and it's going to add all of those things in here.
Now what I can do is use another technique going to Contact Sheet and easily rearrange things like I want. Contact Sheet is really useful because you can see everything at once and drag and drop to put things in the right order. So let's put the Cover Sheet here at the beginning and I can correct any other things that are in the wrong order as well. You can also use the Cover Sheet View to drag and drop things. So let's take that image in there. We couldn't use image in that insert command but we can drag and drop it here. So now that's in there and we can put that where we want. Let's go back to Thumbnails View here and you could see everything is organized just like I want it.
You're not just restricted to using the apps that I've shown. Anything could export PDF. Even if there's no export to PDF function in the app you could always Print and then use the PDF option there. So you could use documents from Microsoft apps, from other third party apps, from all sorts of webpages. Anything that you could create a PDF with or an image with you can then go ahead and create a combination PDF document by merging them together in Preview.

Comments: 10 Responses to “How To Create a Single PDF From Multiple Documents On a Mac”

Ken Sisitka

4 years ago

How is this better than just selecting multiple files and using the quick action- create pdf command? Perhaps there are formatting issues? no need to export!

Gary Rosenzweig

Ken: You get to assemble the PDF with a lot more control. You can arrange them. Put a Numbers chart between pages of a Pages document. Add a photo later on, etc.

Paul

Thanks for the video. Combining several items into one PDF has been a struggle at time for me. (I also appreciated the Innitech T.P.S. Report).

Jim Terrinoni

Great video! I use these techniques quite often. Two things: For Ken Sisitka, Gary’s method of dragging is more reliable than just mass dragging files in. Sometimes dragging mass files will change the order of the files in the final pdf. I would recommend using Gary’s method of viewing via Contact Sheet to proof for order. Secondly: If you have the Acrobat application and want to reduce file size, Go to Save as Reduced File. Sometimes this only saves a little, sometimes a lot.

Marla Loturco

Thanks so much. Have just switched back to MAC and have been doing lots of combining pdf's on my PC. Hadn't researched how to to it on the MAC yet so this was perfect timing. I really appreciate how clearly you explain things.

CoachWhite

Isn’t it faster to do it from the finder? You just highlight all the PDFs then right click, choose quick actions and combine. From there you can just organize the order of things. What do you think?

By the way, thanks for the video. There was many new things about the process I learned about different ways to create PDFs.

CoachWhite: If you have everything together before you start, yes. But this technique is more versatile. Of course you can do both.

Several times you mentioned “save.” My experience is that Preview saves changes automatically. Am I mistaken?

Ed: When you quit or close the document, yes. But you can still save without quitting or closing. File, Save.

Comments Closed.

How To Create a Single PDF From Multiple Documents On a Mac

Comments: 10 Responses to “How To Create a Single PDF From Multiple Documents On a Mac”

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