Split, Merge and Reorder: Getting a Contract Bundle Into the Right Shape

Contracts rarely arrive as one clean file. They arrive as a master agreement, three schedules emailed separately, an amendment from four months later, and a scan of the signature page with two blank sheets the feeder picked up. Before anyone can read, send or file that, it has to become one document in the right order.

None of this needs software installed, and none of it needs an account.

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Pull one part out

Split PDF takes a page selection — 1-5, 8, 12-15 — and gives you those parts as separate files. Or splits every page into its own file, which is what you want when a scanner has bundled twenty unrelated documents into one PDF.

The common use is smaller than that: someone asks for “just Schedule 2” and you send five pages instead of sixty.

A note worth knowing: many contracts arrive with printing or copying restricted by the sender. Those files have no password to type — they open in any reader — and they split normally.

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Join the pieces

Merge PDF concatenates files in the order you list them. Up to 20 files at a time.

The order is the order you give, so put the master agreement first, schedules in their numbered order, amendments last by date. A bundle assembled in the wrong order is read in the wrong order, and the last version of a clause is the one that governs.

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Fix the pages themselves

For everything that is not cutting or joining, the document workspace takes one upload and applies operations to it in place, so you are not downloading and re-uploading between each step:

• Rotate the pages a scanner fed in sideways
• Delete pages — the fax cover sheet, the duplicate
• Extract pages — keep only what you need
• Reorder, or move a single page to where it belongs
• Duplicate a page, insert blanks where a signature block should go
• Remove blank pages the feeder picked up
• Merge another PDF into the middle of this one
• Compress, and remove metadata
• Recognise text on the pages that are scans

Up to 500 pages. The working copy is held for two hours and then deleted — long enough to finish, short enough that nobody is storing your contracts.

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Then make it smaller

Bundles get large, and mail servers reject attachments at around 10 MB and sometimes at 5. Compress PDF is the usual fix and tells you the reduction it achieved.

If it is still too big, the size is almost always scanned pages rather than text. Splitting the bundle and sending the annexes separately beats compressing a scan until it is unreadable.

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Strip what you did not mean to send

A PDF carries metadata: the author name, the software, the creation and modification dates, sometimes the file path it was saved from. On a contract going to the other side, that can say more than you intended — including who really drafted it and when.

Remove metadata in the workspace clears it.

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And read it before it goes

Once the bundle is one document in the right order, upload it for a free review. Six scores out of ten with the reasoning for each, and a count of the concrete weaknesses found — free, no account.

Do it on the assembled bundle rather than the master agreement alone. Schedules are where payment terms, service levels and liability caps usually live, and a master agreement that reads well on its own can be undone entirely by Schedule 3.

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Next step: open the workspace → — one upload, every operation, nothing kept. Or start with split or merge.