Recently one of our Realtors® asked us an interesting question – how do I combine multiple PDF documents into one neat PDF? There are times when you want to combine your introduction letter, the marketing plans, an assessment, your brochures, newspaper ad template etc. into one chunk – whether it’s for acquiring that new listing, or to send reports of an open house, or really any other purpose, this can be an easy way to send documents to your clients without attaching too many PDFs into one. Less files: less confusion, and easier file management!

So, how do we achieve this? There are many ways, but let’s look at the most accessible ways first.

Convert PDFs online

This is by far the easiest and cheapest way to achieve this. There are many sites you can use:

  1. www.pdfmerge.com – it provides the service free for up to 15MBs, which should be plenty for most situations. When using this one, ignore the red “Download Now” button (unless you want to pay for a desktop software to install, which is not what we recommend).
  2. www.ilovepdf.com/merge_pdf – Up to 10 PDF files, maximum 80MBs means a larger limit. The upload/download speed on this website was much better than the one above. So far ILovePDF is the winner on our books!

Use a Desktop Software

Adobe Acrobat Pro is a powerful PDF management software for Mac & Windows

Frankly we do not recommend this – more and more software is going in the direction of web-based services, and cluttering your computer with more programs is not necessary. That being said, when we combine PDFs in-house, we use Adobe Acrobat Pro – it’s not a free software, but it is extremely powerful. The functionalities go way beyond simply combining PDFs.

Adobe Acrobat Pro allows you to:

  1. Create PDF forms that can collect data
  2. Include multimedia (pictures, videos) from multiple sources into the PDF
  3. Sign PDFs
  4. And more!

Acrobat Pro is available for both Windows and Mac OSX. However, the price tag is not exactly low.

Another open-source (free) option is PDF Rider – it appears to be only for Windows at this point. You can read a review of PDF Rider by Addictive Tips.