Once again my little Macbook has succeeded in surprising me with its functionality. A couple months ago LifeHacker had posted about the downloadable Mac tool Combine PDF, a freeware that emulates Adobe Acrobat. I used the application and was happy with the product, but did feel the layout could have been a little more user friendly. I hadn’t used the application for about a month and went to use it yesterday evening. For some reason I was unable to upload the files I needed to combine. I tried downloading the latest version of Combing PDF and still no dice. After a quick Google search I learned that a PDF combining functionality is already built in on Macs and that freeware isn’t necessary at all.

The built-in tool is called the Automator and is esentially a list of macros that can be ran on a file without having to open the file. There are 212 actions available for all built-in application.

Since Microsoft Word was installed there are no actions available to turn a doc into a PDF, meaning that the doc will need to be opened in Microsoft word and saved as a PDF. Unlike Windows where a driver is necessary, the Mac version has the option already available in the print box as a button on the left corner.

Once all the files are saved as PDF’s, highlight them in the finder, ctrl+click, and choose Automator and Create Workflow. The Automator box pulls up and shows you all actions available. Find ‘Combine PDF Pages’ in the list of actions (easier to find by using the search box) and double click so that it is added to the workflow. Make sure that appending pages is marked. Then find the action ‘Open Finder Items’ and choose Default Application. This will open the combined file and allow you to save it.

From there, save the file with the name and in the directory of choice.

I love Apple!