Worried about merge or split documents of various types in multiple platforms? There could be many statements in your mind:

  • How to merge PDF documents together in Java?
  • Want to split word documents, or merge excel spreadsheets.
  • What to do if I need to merge PPT/PPTX presentations.
  • Many more questions, the list may not end.
Split or Merge PDF, Word, Excel documents in Java
GroupDocs.Merger for Java

GroupDocs provides a document merging solution for all such requirements. It’s Java API allows you to merge documents and manipulate document structure in Java across a wide range of supported document formats. It further allows manipulating document pages, page transformations, information extraction from the documents, generating previews, and much more.

In this article, we will look a bit about the following topics :

The code sample and steps explained below are using GroupDocs.Merger for Java so you may download or integrate it into your maven-based applications with pom.xml configurations.

Merge PDF files in Java

We can combine two or more PDF files in just a few lines of code. Below is the code snippet from the examples, that is self-explanatory and needs no further clarification, hence shows how to merge multiple PDF documents in Java. Steps are very simple if you have done deciding the documents to join together:

  • Instantiate Merger object, with the first document with which other documents are to be merged.
  • Call join method, passing the document to merge.
  • Recall join method to merge more documents.
  • Call save method to save the final output.
  • That’s it.
// Set paths for the documents to join together in a single file.
String filePath1 = "document-1.pdf";
String filePath2 = "document-2.pdf";
String filePath3 = "document-3.pdf";
// Merger multiple PDF documents into a single PDF file.
Merger merger = new Merger(filePath1 );
merger.join(filePath2 ); // Joining 2nd Document
merger.join(filePath3 ); // Joining 3rd Document
// Save the merged document.
String filePathOutput = "mergedDocument.pdf";
merger.save(filePathOutput);

Merge Excel, Word, PowerPoint Documents in Java

You can combine multiple Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, in fact, almost any documents of the same format. The above code of joining PDF documents can be used to merge a wide variety of documents. At the bottom of the article, I will mention the list of file formats that can be merged with the same code. Here for an example, I am showing how similarly, more than two Word documents can be combined together into a single Word file in just a few lines of Java code.

// Merger multiple Word documents into a single DOCX file.
Merger merger = new Merger("document1.docx" );
merger.join("document2.docx" ); // Joining 2nd Document
merger.join("document3.docx" ); // Joining 3rd Document
// Save the merged document.
merger.save("mergedDocument.pdf");

Merge Document Pages in Java

Multiple documents can be merged by selective pages and also by specifying the desired page range. Your code will remain similar to the mentioned above, just a little change while setting your merging options using JoinOptions class.

Below is the source code snippet that shows how to merge documents by specifying certain pages.

// Set the start and end page number in JoinOptions class.
JoinOptions joinOptions = new JoinOptions(1, 2);
// Merge two files with selective pages using join method.
Merger merger = new Merger("document-1.docx");
merger.join("document-2.docx" , joinOptions);
merger.save("merged-Document.docx");

Split Documents into Multiple Documents in Java

Just like we have merged documents above, we can also split Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, presentations, PDF files, and many other documents quickly in different ways.

  • Split by exact page numbers
  • Split a document to several multi-page documents
  • Split by page range
  • Split by Even and Odd pages

Split by Exact Page Numbers

We can split a document by providing the exact number of pages in Java. The following code will split a PDF file into 3 documents, each having the mentioned single page.

  • Initialize the SplitOptions object with output file and mode to split.
  • Instantiate the Merger object with the source file or stream to split.
  • Call the split method to split the provided document and get it saved.
String filePath = "document.pdf";
String filePathOut = "document\_{0}.{1}";
// Split the document into multiple single page documents.
SplitOptions splitOptions = new SplitOptions(filePathOut, new int\[\] { 3, 6, 8 });
Merger merger = new Merger(filePath);
merger.split(splitOptions);

Split Document into Multipage Documents

If you have a document with 6 pages, the below mentioned little modification in the above code will split your document into 3 separate documents in the following manner:

Document Name Page Numbers
document_1 1, 2
document_2 3, 4, 5
document_3 6 
SplitOptions splitOptions = new SplitOptions(filePathOut,  SplitMode.Interval, new int\[\] { 3, 6 },);

Split by Start & End Page Range

If you want to split any document by just providing the page range, here is how a Powerpoint presentation can be split into 3 single page presentations.

String filePath = "presentation.ppt";
String filePathOut = "presentation\_{0}.{1}";
// Split the presentation into multiple single page presentations.
SplitOptions splitOptions = new SplitOptions(filePathOut, 3, 5);
Merger merger = new Merger(filePath);
merger.split(splitOptions)

Split by Even or Odd Page Ranges

You can set the even and odd page ranges to split. Following SplitOptions will allow splitting the provided document into multiple one-page documents for odd pages in the range of 3 to 8.

SplitOptions splitOptions = new SplitOptions(filePathOut, 3, 8, RangeMode.OddPages);

Supported Document Formats

As promised, here is the list of document formats that can be merged or split with the above examples. You may visit docs anytime to check the updated list.

Document Type File Formats
Word Processing DOC, DOCX, DOCM, DOT, DOTX, DOTM, ODT, OTT, RTF, TXT
Spreadsheets XLS, XLSX, XLSM, XLSB, XLT, XLTX, XLTM, ODS, CSV, TSV
Presentations PPT, PPTX, PPS, PPSX, ODP, OTP
Drawings VSDX, VSDM, VSSX, VSSM, VSTX, VSTM, VDX, VSX, VTX
Web HTML, MHT
Page Description Languages TEX, XPS
eBooks & Others PDF, EPUB, ONE

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See Also