I came across a fantastic Mac tool today due to this LifeHacker blog post. The tool, CombinePDFs, has the same functionality as Adobe Acrobat but is free. I have the need to combine or edit PDF’s on at least a weekly basis and without a PDF editing tool the only way I can merge documents is to first combine in Word and then turn the whole document into a PDF. Needless to say, it is an utter pain and sometimes word documents of the PDFs are no longer on file.

I saw the blog post for the freeware on a day (today) in which I had a need for such a product. I downloaded, tested it and was pleasantly surprised. The tool edits the documents in a different structure than Acrobat as it brings up a box with the pages listed and the options to add files, remove pages and merge documents, rather than the Acrobat version that allows the user to view the document and changing the page layout by actually dragging the thumbnail of the page to its new destination.

This edit structure isn’t as convenient as Adobe Acrobat because Acrobat shows the actual PDF whereas CombinePDF gives the user only the picture above, forcing the user to know the pages that needed to be edited prior to being able to view the document layout. Sure it is a little hiccup, but it is one thousand times better than my current solution and so I will use it with a smile.