Merge & Extract PDFs in SharePoint—No Acrobat Needed!

By Microsoft MVP and MCT · Pluralsight Author

Published July 31, 2025 · Updated January 26, 2026 · Microsoft 365, SharePoint

Tired of switching tools just to split or combine PDF files? With SharePoint Content AI, you can now merge and extract PDFs directly in the browser—no Adobe Acrobat or third-party tools required.

In this episode, Microsoft MVP Drew Madelung walks us through how to:
✔️Merge multiple PDFs into a single file in SharePoint or OneDrive
✔️Extract selected pages from a PDF without installing anything
✔️Use this feature across Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint
✔️Save time and streamline your document workflows

⚙️ This feature requires with Pay-As-You-Go to be setup but has no cost to use!

📌 This is part of our Ultimate SharePoint Content AI series — check out the full playlist to go even deeper.

Video Summary

  • You can now merge and extract PDF files directly in the browser using SharePoint, OneDrive, or Teams—no need for Acrobat or third-party tools.
  • Once you enable Pay-As-You-Go (which takes just 10 minutes), the PDF merge and extract features become available across your Microsoft 365 environment—at no extra cost.
  • The experience is super intuitive: just open a PDF, click the merge or extract icon, select your files or pages, name the new file, and choose where to save it.
  • A handy tip: use the left navigation rail to move between folders, SharePoint sites, and Teams—so you’re not limited to the current location.
  • This feature is a game-changer for content creators and admins who work with lots of PDFs—especially when building deliverables or organizing content repositories.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

Need to merge multiple PDF files into one directly in SharePoint, or maybe you want to create a new PDF file just by taking pieces from another one. With the PDF merge and extract functionality, all of that is possible, and you don’t even need to have anything installed on your device. In this video, I’m joined by Microsoft MVP Drew Madelung, who will deep dive into the PDF merge and extract functionality. Drew, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, Vlad. So, my name is Drew Madelung, and I’ll be talking through the PDF merge and extract functionality today. What we’re going to be going through is how PDF merge and extract PDFs. I’ll be talking about how to merge, how to extract, and then some helpful tips about using PDF merge and extract inside of your organization. And for those of you who just got to the series, this is the 12th episode in the series on SharePoint Content AI Services. And you’ll have a link to all the series so you can really get the most out of SharePoint in the description below.

But Vlad, I can’t wait to see this one. So, we’re going to start with what is PDF merge and extract is and what you get? So, the two options we have are going to be set up as part of the pay-as-you-go features that you have inside your organization as part of Content AI. So what happens is once you’ve enabled that and you open up a PDF in the browser, you’re going to have two new options or two new icons as part of that file viewer experience inside of the browser. So before you have, you don’t have that after you have a little arrow and the two little arrow icons next to each other. Those are going to be our new PDF merge and extract functionality once been enabled inside of your organization.

The first one is going to be the merge. It looks like the arrow is pointing to the right. And the extract is going to be the one with two different file two different files, basically stacked on top of each other. And these are part of pay-as-you-go, but there is no cost to them. So this is something that once you’ve enabled pay-as-you-go inside of your organization, which you do have another video in the series that talks about that in depth. Once that has been enabled, this will be available to you across your OneDrive and Teams. So anywhere where your files exist in that file viewer experience, you’ll have the ability to merge and extract PDFs.

Awesome. And like you said, enabling pay-as-you-go, it only takes 10 minutes. If you’ve done it already, well, you’re good to go. And if you need to learn how to do it, the link to that specific video will be in the description below. So, it will only take 10 minutes, and then you’ll have all the features that Drew will talk about.

So, the first thing we’re going to talk about is how to merge a PDF inside the browser. So, the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to open up a PDF. Then what you’re going to do is you’re going to click on the merge icon inside of that file viewer experience. It’s going to be that one with the two little arrows next to each other. And then what you’re going to select are the different files you want to merge. So we’re doing we’re taking multiple PDF files and bringing them into one file. So you’re creating a new file with those combined PDFs.

So what does that look like? So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go into OneDrive. It could be OneDrive or SharePoint doesn’t matter. And we have a collection of PDFs out here. So I have two different PDFs here. Both about agents. I have a one-pager and a quick start guide. And what I want to do is say I want to actually have a single PDF supporting Copilot supporting SharePoint agents. So if I look at this and I go into one of these files, you’ll see this says just a single-page PDF. If I look in the other one, this is going to be a couple of pages PDF in here, multiple pages here. And what I want to do is I want to merge these.

So what I do is I go up here and I have this little icon in the top right. When I click on that, it’s going to give me the option to select the different PDFs that I want to merge. And what you’ll see is I’m actually in a basically a type of document explorer, file explorer view. It does not give you the full functionality as a document library view would, but you are able to traverse into different folders inside of that location to be able to select them. So I can take these two agent files. These are the two files I want to merge. And I’m going to go down here and I’m going to click next.

When I click next, you’re going to see it’s going to say it’s going to give me an option to pick a name. So, I’m going to call this let’s call this a new agent SharePoint quick start guide. And I can choose where to save it. So, in this example, I’m going to save it back into this demo location. You see on the left, I could pick different locations that I want to share with different quick access locations. This one is in my OneDrive. So you’ll see my file options. If you do this in SharePoint, you’d have a slightly different view, but the point is you can pick these files and choose where you want to save them. You do need to save them in the browser. So I’m not going to be able to save directly to my desktop. But when I do merge these, I can say save here. And once I pick that, once I do that, I come back into my library and I click refresh. You’re going to see I have a brand new file in here called a new agent SharePoint quick start guide that includes both of those PDF files merged into one.

In this example, I don’t need to have Acrobat. I don’t need to have a third-party tool to be able to download that file, move convert it, let’s say, to a different file to make it accessible that we allow it to be merged. I can do it directly in the browser in just a few simple clicks.

That’s pretty amazing. I work so much with PDFs, and I don’t have the full Adobe experience on every device that I own. So being able to do that in the browser really really cool.

Yeah. One thing I’ve found good for PDF merging is the ability to when I have multiple files, for let’s say a presentation. So if I’m putting something together, like at a conference, and I have multiple slide decks that I use, I’m able to take sections of those slides and have single slides that I want and bring that all into one overall presentation at the end. So if you start to think about dissecting or breaking apart your materials that you have as you’re creating new content, and that’s kind of supporting that content AI theory, is how it works in content management. I’m able to take those files, break them apart to what I need and only merge what I want to, and build that new content to kind of build these content repositories inside of SharePoint OneDrive and Teams.

Awesome. The next thing we’re going to talk about is extracting PDFs. So, what you do for PDF extraction is I be able to open the PDF in the browser, follow a very similar process, but I’m going to click the extract icon. That extract icon is then going to allow me to choose multiple pages to extract. So, I can take, let’s say, a very large PDF, pick the pages I want, and create a new page, a new PDF from that.

So, what does that look like? When I come into the same OneDrive folder, I have a file called M365 in SharePoint. When I open up this file, I find a large collection of information in here, all around different functionalities that we provide and different services that we can do for organizations. But let’s say this is way too much, and I want to send Vlad some information about how to do a migration based on the way I think that. So what I can do is I can go up here into the top right, top left, and click extract. So the icon is right next to it. When I click extract, you’re going to see I have the collection of all of the different pages in this PDF.

Now, what I want to do is just grab that migration section. So, that’s this collection over here. I’ll use that header one. Let’s grab. I don’t want that timeline. Can’t take that one. Let’s take these files that I want. Right. So, I’m selecting different versions. And let’s do just the closing section. I want to make sure it has a closing one. I can take these separate pages. And once I’ve selected them, I have the option up in the top left here to say extract.

When I say extract, you have a very similar file experience as when you did the PDF merge. Where you have kind of a save view where I can pick different locations in the site or library that I’m working in. And what you’ll need to do is you want to create a name for it. So similar to merge, it said merge. This one says extract. I want to say this is going to be just M365 and SharePoint migration solutions. I’ll click save here. When I come back in, refresh this page, you’re going to see I have a new file called M365 SharePoint and migration solutions right here. When I go into that PDF, it’s going to have only the migration details that I included. So, we got rid of all of the extra details that we needed to bring this down to a very concise file that I wanted to work with.

Very similar to merge. I did not need to open up Acrobat. I did not install anything on my machine. Directly inside the browser in Microsoft 365, I’m able to merge and extract those PDFs.

That’s amazing. And as much as I’m a Microsoft person, the world runs on PDF files, especially for deliverables and things like that. So, being able to do that in the browser, anything installed is amazing.

Absolutely. Now, some tips to work with when you are working with this. It only works in the browser. So, it is not something that you’re able to work on locally on your machine. You have to use a separate product for that, but this is browser-specific.

The easiest way to navigate is going to be when I’m working within OneDrive, when I’m selecting multiple. So when I open up that explorer view and I click extract to merge use, if you click on the My Files, use that left navigation, and you can select multiple files when you’re doing that or extract to separate locations. So the tip is to use the left navigation. People might just assume you can just save where you’re at. You can use that on the side, and that left rail lets you go to different SharePoint sites.

So I could—I don’t actually have to even—I can extract a file, let’s say in my OneDrive or take PDFs on my OneDrive and extract them to a separate SharePoint or Team that I have access to. So it doesn’t have to live in that exact location. You can use that left rail within your files and use that left rail to navigate to separate sites.

It will provide a default name. I kind of see that as a little hidden when you’re looking at the bottom left there for each of those. You do need—you do want to change that as you go through similar if you’re kind of working in mobile experience. But you will want to make sure you go change that before. You can always change it after, but it’s nice to do that as you’re right in line.

And this does require pay-as-you-go. So we said that early in the video, but to reiterate at the end: there is no cost to work with the PDF merge. You just need to have it set up, have it configured. You do have to enable this feature specifically in there or as soon as pay-as-you-go is on—any pay-as-you-go service. So once you’ve enabled pay-as-you-go, the PDF merge and extract feature will be available across all of your Microsoft 365 locations, wherever you have PDF files inside of SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams inside the file experience. Nothing to set up, simply a pay-as-you-go configuration as part of the Content AI series world.

I love those free ones. It’s very nice.

We need more of them. We need more of them.

Awesome. Well, Drew, thank you so much for showing us this functionality. It’s a small feature, but that has such a big impact when you need it. And for the people who don’t have the full Adobe Acrobat installed, it’s amazing.

And for all of you watching, thank you so much for watching this video. If you want to check out all the other videos in the series, the playlist should be on your screen right about now. And if you want to connect with Drew and see all his other amazing content, you’ll have all his socials in the description below. So, thank you so much and see you in the next one.