Rearranging Pages to Customize a PDF

Whether you’re filling out tax forms, editing healthcare documents, or an completing an application for a loan, house, or a job, you may find that you need to rearrange the order of the pages.

PDFfiller‘s “rearrange pages” tool allows you to change the order of the pages in a PDF that you are working on, and delete any pages you don’t want or need. This tool can also be used to rotate your pages from portrait view to landscape, or vice versa.

A great example form to demonstrate the “rearrange pages” function is the Common Application for Undergraduate College Admission. This form has lots of pages, but different parts of the form need to be completed by different people: the student applying to the college, teachers giving recommendations, and school officials reporting grades and class rankings.

Before beginning the form, a student might find it helpful to sort through the fourteen page PDF form and regroup the ones she will be completing, removing any pages that will be completed by other people, or ones that aren’t applicable to her.

This is done in the main document editing window, by clicking on the button that says “pages” and has two gear shaped images on it, like this:

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Clicking this button opens a panel with thumbnail images of each of the fourteen pages in the document. When you open the panel, the first page will be selected by default. You can select any individual page by clicking on it, or use the select all/deselect all buttons as needed.

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Let’s imagine you are a student sitting down and reviewing the application for the first time before completing it. You would notice immediately that the first five pages are meant for you to complete, and that the other nine are to be completed by others, except for a few small sections at the top.

Taking a closer look at the first five pages, you might determine that page 4, which asks about academic honors and extracurricular activities doesn’t apply to you at all. So, you can move it into the group of pages that only requires partial completion.

In order to do this, you’d select page four:

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and move it over two places by clicking on the right-facing arrow in the top menu bar.

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Note that clicking this arrow has moved page 4 from it’s original location in the document (between page three and page five) to a new location (between page five and page six).

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If you click the “Save” button after making this change, the entire document will be re-saved with the new page order.

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If you want to change the order back to what it was originally, you can use the “Restore“ button to revert back to the last version of the document.

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Finally, before you begin filling out your part of the application, you might want to delete the pages that you will not be completing altogether. You can do this by selecting each page that you want to delete individually, and then clicking the “delete” button while each page is selected.

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In this case, once you delete the unnecessary pages and save the document, you are left with a 4-page document to fill out and submit, made of what was once pages 1, 2, 3 and 5 of the original Common Application.

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You can use the rearrange pages tool, and the same techniques, to edit any other document you’ve uploaded. You’re in complete control!