Do you own an iPad? Do you pay for a PDF app?

If your answer to both questions is yes, then this article is hopefully going to help you save some money. Because…

The iPad natively includes all major features of professional PDF software.

In a previous article, we explored the incredible PDF capabilities of the iPad around creating, editing, annotating, and signing PDFs on the iPad.

In this article, I want to extend this journey with you even further by making use of a very powerful app — Shortcuts.

The Shortcuts app comes with several PDF commands and allows you to build very powerful and useful tools that other apps charge you for.

Follow me along with this article and let me guide you through building your own PDF power tools. Let‘s start with…

Professional PDF software allows the splitting of a single PDF file into different other PDF files by combining distinct pages of that given PDF into a new file. This functionality can easily be built into the iPad‘s Shortcuts app by using the “Split PDF” action.

There are different ways of building this shortcut. I introduce four different variations here.

1 File selection and page list

This shortcut will open a file selection window and show a list of the individual pages of the PDF file from which the pages of interest can be selected.

Open Shortcuts and create a blank shortcut. Add the “Select File” action to the blank shortcut and keep “Select Multiple” disabled.

Then, add the “Split PDF” action at the second position. The variable will automatically connect to the first command.

In the next step, we want to display a list of the individual pages of the PDF file. Therefore, add a “List” action at the third position of the shortcut. Remove the second item in the list and replace the first one with the…