What is the fastest way to combine a 96 documents into one?

March 3, 2023 9:37 PM

I volunteered to do some "light document cleanup and formatting" for this understaffed volunteer advocacy group and it turns out they have NINETY SIX separate memos of support from various organizations. Ayiyiyi. How can i make this go faster?

What I currently have is 96 files in a google drive. Some are uploaded word documents, some are regular google docs, some are PDFs, some have typos I am supposed to fix, All need to be re-named to fit a defined naming convention within the google drive, and the end goal is a single PDF of ALL the memos so that it's one email attachment.

I'm wondering if anyone here has any brilliant speeding-up-the-process suggestions so i don't spend all weekend doing it.

I would love to hear that i don't need to get an adobe subscription and a Microsoft office subscription for this, but i think i need to get an adobe acrobat and Microsoft office subscription for the Mega PDF?

posted by wowenthusiast to Media & Arts (11 answers total)

Best answer: I don't think you're going to be able to get out of the work to fix typos and save each of the documents as PDFs in the new naming convention as a more or less manual process, but once you have a set of PDFs, you can use PDF Arranger to combine them into one file for free.

If some sets of files have a naming convention of their own, it's possible that a bulk rename utility like PowerRename (one of the PowerToys utilities) could help. If you're not already familiar with regular expressions though I'd probably just do that manually.
posted by Aleyn at 10:02 PM on March 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

Best answer: If you have access to a printer, scanner, pen and whiteout, it might be faster to print all the documents out, fix typos the old-school way, then scan them as one gigantic PDF.

If the end goal is a single PDF, is there the option of deleting the original 96 files once that single PDF exists, rather than renaming them?
posted by are-coral-made at 10:29 PM on March 3, 2023

Best answer: Bulk Rename Utility is a great free tool. The UI can be seen as scary because it’s full of fields and checkboxes - but you don’t need all the options, nor do you need to know regex (although you can use it here if you want). I have gone through and replaced filenames, numbering, or inserting/removing characters and padding elements for hundreds of files. It’s really good!
posted by alchemist at 10:52 PM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: I'm not sure if this will help but:

1. Fix the typos where you need to. There is no getting around that, I don't think.

2. If many of the files have slightly similar names, you can batch or group rename on a Mac: Put these files in the same folder, highlight/select the file list, right click, then choose "Rename". You can then use regex-like rules to batch rename: For example,you can change "file 1", file 2", "file 3",etc to "memo 1", "memo 2", etc, by telling rename to change "file" to "memo" rather than renaming each file one by one.

3. In Mac's Preview app, open your first PDF. Select "View", then "Thumbnails". Your first file's pages will show there. Now you can drag your other files to the thumbnail column, right under your first file. You can do this file by file or all at once. When you have all 96 there, you can reorder them just by dragging them up or down. When finished, you have a single PDF will all your files. Make sure to save that as a new file, or for good measure, print it as a new PDF or export it as a new PDF. Done!

Good luck. I hope this teaches you that no good deed goes unpunished. Just kidding: Good for you to help out.
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 10:54 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Wow I do this all for fun - you want to:
1 - rename files
2 - fix typos
3 - combine them all into one

for 1 - do this by hand. Will not take long, make sure you start with the original folder, make a copy then rename those. Ensure your template text allows you to append the numbers. So for instance "DOC-CHAR-MEMO 01" is the first, click on the next file, press F2 (on Windows this allows you to rename the file), then paste "DOC-CHAR-MEMO", type space then the two numbers. You will have it done in under 30 mins once you start rolling. If the docs are out of order then make sub folders with them in groups of ten.

Remember on windows not to change the letters after the dot. This controls which app opens the file so .doc is for word files and .pdf is for pdf files etc etc

for two - do this by hand. you could ask the memo writers to do this.

for three - download pdfsam basic which will allow you to combine all the pdfs into one. You will first need to
a) convert word docs into pdf (if you do not have Word installed ask a friend who has, again laborious but simply go to File menu and click SaveAs then choose pdf)
b) convert google docs into pdf (Click File menu and Export the pdf)
c) pdfs leave as is
once you have done all above pdfsam basic or pdfshaper free will combine them into one file.
https://pdfsam.org/pdfsam-basic/
https://www.pdfshaper.com/download.html

The above websites will desperately try to get you to pay for the full version but the free version does all you need. If you have a Mac you'll need to google but you should be able to use pdfsam free version.

Good luck
posted by Vroom_Vroom_Vroom at 2:16 AM on March 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Just a heads-up that a 96-page PDF may end up being larger than the maximum allowable size for an email attachment (this would depend on the resolution of the PDF). That's not a disaster, though, as you can always upload it to your Google Drive location and share it via a link.
posted by alex1965 at 3:32 AM on March 4, 2023

Best answer: You can use Libre Office to convert Office files to PDFs, then use PDFtk Server to assemble them. I have a script I can share if you're interested.

For renaming, a tip I learned on MF is to hit tab after renaming a file; this will take you to the next file, with it highlighted for renaming.
posted by jmfitch at 6:13 AM on March 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Also remember that Word allows you to save file as PDF....
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 9:17 AM on March 4, 2023

Response by poster: Thank you friends you are truly legendary
<3
posted by wowenthusiast at 9:55 AM on March 4, 2023

Best answer: I use PDF24 to convert and combine PDFs for work. It's totally free and does a crap ton of different things.
posted by kathrynm at 1:04 PM on March 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure Google Docs does a surprisingly good job of reading PDFs, if you have to edit PDFs and don't want to have to pay for an Adobe subscription. (So the process would probably be: open the PDF in Google docs, edit, and then export/save to PDF again.)
posted by kristi at 10:39 AM on March 5, 2023