For those of us who have to work with documents on a daily basis, it can become a hassle to sort and organize them all. This is especially true for people who work in business and need to decide what is important and what to do with different documents. For many people, this means working with PDFs since they are one of the most common document types that people have to work with regularly. One of the ways we can work to organize documents is through merging. This is because many documents that are related or are part of the same data set can be merged, which can be useful for a variety of reasons. This can be true, or you might just need to merge them together for a project or presentation, either way being able to work with and merge PDF documents is a necessary skill when working with documents.
Preparing for Document Merging
Firstly you need to prepare your documents for the merger. This means organizing everything and knowing what should be merged and what documents should be left alone or archived. There are some other things you will need to consider when merging documents such as security. If you are working with private documents or documents that carry confidential information, you might be legally required to secure the document. So before you merge make sure you have all the permissions you need and then you can begin merging documents.
The Document Merging Process
The process of merging documents will seem straightforward but there are some things to know beforehand. Obviously, you first need to know what to merge, but after this, you need to know how they should be organized. If you are making some sort of larger report or book, it is helpful (but not always necessary) to arrange things as they should be. Once you know what you need to merge and have them organized, you can go to your PDF editor and then select the documents you wish to merge. Depending on which PDF editor you use, there will be different choices in the user interface but generally, they will be similar in that under tools there will be a merge option. After you do this, you can merge the documents. Now you have a merged PDF! Great news, but things are not over yet, now you should check your document and make sure everything is alright, you can of course make changes at this stage so do not worry if something is misplaced.
Metadata and Indexing
For many people documentation extends beyond organizing and merging documents. As you might know, data is king these days, there is more to data than data though. One of the most important things that companies can have and keep track of is metadata. So, what is metadata? Metadata is the data points within sets of data. For example, you have the names of customers but the fact that John Doe’s first name is John is stored as metadata. These data points allow companies to easily organize or extract information from large sets of data. One merging and organizing PDFs and their metadata there are some best practices. You need to first name and index your metadata. This is to say that you should identify the data you want to index. From there you can create a table of contents that can show your document more fully. Doing these things will make your document more complete and more useful to others who might need to use it. While metadata sounds complicated, with a solid PDF editor, many of these steps can be automated.
Collaboration and Sharing
In addition to merging and organizing a PDF, there are many other things you can do with a PDF document and a PDF editor. One of these things is to share your PDF with others. One of the best things about PDFs in general is that they are compatible with many different platforms. They were created to be usable across many devices and OS since it makes it easier for everyone. If you have Lumin PDF you can do this easily using their application to safely share files on Google Drive with your coworkers, this way they can easily access the file. There are some other considerations though in terms of sharing a PDF with others. One of those things is security. Always make sure you are sharing the document with the right person and that the document is secure itself. In addition to this, you can change the level of access for other people so that some might just be able to read or view the PDF while others might be able to edit PDFs or make some comments on the document itself.
Working with PDFs can be a joy with the right tools and there are many things that you can do with them with a little time and experience. When you know how to merge a PDF with another, you have the ability to create larger documents that can be used for projects or as a means to organize large data sets for collecting and harvesting metadata that can help your company connect with customers. This is not the only important tool however since every PDF editor comes with a set of tools that helps you to create a document that fixes your needs exactly.
