Sorting a long document with the Organise pages grid

Reordering pages in a thin strip of thumbnails works for a short letter, but it gets tiresome on a report of sixty pages. You scroll, lose your place, scroll back and wonder whether the appendix ended up before or after the index. The Organise pages grid in PDF by Zaweba is the answer to that: it takes the same thumbnails and spreads them across the whole window, so you can see a large part of the document at once and work on it as a set of pages rather than a long scroll.

You open it from Pages > Organise pages, or with Ctrl+Shift+O. The grid fills the window and brings all the page commands with it. When you are finished, double-click any page to jump straight to it in the normal view, or press Esc to go back to where you were.

Why a grid helps

Most page jobs are about structure rather than content. You are not reading the words, you are checking that the cover comes first, that each section starts where it should, that a blank page has not crept in, and that the scanned signature sheet sits at the end. Those are things you judge by shape and layout, and thumbnails laid out in rows show them far better than a single page at reading size.

A grid also makes gaps and repeats obvious. Two identical pages next to each other stand out at a glance. So does a page turned the wrong way, or a page from another document that slipped in during a combine. In a narrow side panel those problems hide; in a full window they are hard to miss.

A sensible way to work through a document

Start by opening the grid and simply looking. Before you change anything, scan from the first page to the last and note what is out of place. It is quicker to plan three moves than to make one, notice another problem and undo.

Then make the changes that affect the most pages first. If whole sections need to swap round, do that before you tidy individual pages, because moving a block of twenty pages will shift everything after it. Single pages that need deleting or turning can be handled once the overall order is right.

When you think the order is correct, double-click the first page of each section in turn. That takes you to the page at full size so you can confirm it is the one you expected, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+O again brings you back to the grid for the next check. Moving between the two views like this is much faster than working only in one of them.

Finally, save. The grid changes the open document, so the work is not on disk until you save it, and saving under a new name keeps the original untouched if you want something to go back to.

How the grid fits with the other page tools

The grid is a place to work rather than a separate tool, so everything you already know about the Pages menu still applies. Page labels show up on the thumbnails, which makes the grid a good place to check that a front section numbered in Roman numerals really does stop where the main body begins. If you have just joined several files with File > Combine files, the grid is the natural next stop for checking how the pieces landed and whether anything needs moving.

It is also useful before printing or exporting. A quick look over the whole document in the grid catches the stray blank page that would otherwise cost you a sheet of paper, or the sideways page that would come out as an awkward picture.

Mistakes worth avoiding

The most common one is forgetting that Esc goes back without taking you to a particular page. If you want to land on a page you have just spotted, double-click it instead. Pressing Esc returns you to the view you left.

Another is making lots of changes without saving a copy first. On an important document, save it under a new name before you start reorganising, so a muddle can never cost you the original.

The last is trusting the grid alone for content. Thumbnails are small, and two pages with similar layouts can look alike. Where the order really matters, such as a contract or exam paper, open the pages you have moved and read their first lines.

Used this way, the Organise pages grid turns a fiddly scrolling job into something you can see whole, and it keeps every page command close at hand while you do it.