Merge, split and reorder: the three page jobs

Almost every request that starts "can you just" is one of three jobs: put these together, take this apart, or put these in the right order.

Put them together

Merge takes several PDFs and makes one. Drag the file rows to set the order before you run it, because the order of the rows is the order of the document.

Images can go in too. A photo of a signed page drops into the sequence like any other file.

Take it apart

There are two different jobs hiding under "split", and picking the wrong one costs you a second pass:

• Split cuts one document into several files, at a page interval or at every bookmark. Use it when you want many documents out.
• Extract pages pulls a range into one new file and leaves the rest behind. Use it when you want one document out.

If what you actually want is to lose a few pages, delete pages says so more directly than either.

Put them in order

Organize shows every page as a thumbnail. Drag them, rotate the ones that came in sideways, delete the blank separator sheets the scanner added. It is the tool for a document that is complete but out of sequence.

Do it in one pass

Real jobs chain. A scan has to be read before it can be searched, signed before it is any use, and squeezed before it will send.

On a site that keeps your document on its own machines, each of those is a separate errand: add the file, wait for it to go across, wait for the result to come back, save it, then add that saved copy to the next tool.

Here the document is already where it needs to be. Finish one tool and the result is handed straight to the next: the same file, still in this tab, never written out to your downloads and read back in. Three tools take one pass instead of three.