Art of Family History | Episode 30

TRANSCRIPT

Quickly Delete Pages in Your Genealogy Worksheets with These Online PDF Tools

PRUDENCE: Ever wish you could remove the page from a PDF document, but the app you have is read-only, not edit? Ugh. So frustrating. And you aren’t ready to invest in an expensive monthly subscription when you only need to use the software once. In episode 30 of the Art of Family History, I answer that question for Kathy, who wants to remove extra pages from her Ultimate All-In-One Worksheet.

Watch now to find out three online PDF editing apps you can use for free, see a demonstration of how each app works, discover any limitations that apply, and find out what I’d do if I had a batch of PDF files to edit.

INTRODUCTION: If this is your first time here, hello, I’m Prudence, The Creative Family Historian. I’m a graphic designer who helps genealogists — like you — bring their family history to life by converting research into stories and beautiful heritage keepsakes. On this channel, I provide tips on family history productivity, organisation, writing and design, as well as sharing my current journey as I undertake a genealogy reset.

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PRUDENCE: Are you ready to remove pages from your PDF? Let’s go.

Okay, so just to recap, so I’m answering the question here of how do you delete pages from your genealogy worksheets once you’ve completed the worksheet? And you know don’t want to print out the extra pages or you just don’t need them because you’ve found out everything there, you’re likely to find out about that person’s children, etc. and you know, there is just no more to find.

1. Tiny Wow

So what you can do – the first one is TinyWow.com. So this is a fantastic site. And as you can see right up here, hopefully you can see right up here in the bar, 100% free, no hourly limits, no restrictions. So that’s why I recommend this one first, because it’s a pretty cool site. Obviously, there’s going to be ads on the site to support the fact that they can make it available for free.

So what you would do in this, you’ll see there’s actually a whole lot of different options that you can have, but you just want that PDF page delete so go to that one. You upload it and as you can see, you can do it from your PC or mobile. Choose your file. This is one I prepared earlier.

Slow internet, not speedy. All right, give it a second. Okay. Before I go any further, I will say that if you have a PDF with fields – form fields – in it as this worksheet does, you will lose those them. Make sure you’re doing this at the end, when you won’t go back in and add a lot of information. Though of course, you can always use fill and sign in Acrobat Reader to do so.

So you just choose the pages that you want to get rid of. You might want to just get rid of those two and maybe the notes and then just hit delete. Only non-robots are allowed to do this . So whoosh off we go. The bigger the file, with more pages the longer it will take. Ah! That does happen sometimes. So we’ll just say start over.

And I find the best way to do that is you just refresh the page and then we’ll just quickly do that again. I knew this would happen. It all worked perfectly in my tests this morning, and now it’s nervous. It’s live, it’s in front of people, and it’s just like “ooh I don’t know if I can do it”. All right. So while that’s processing, let’s move on to the next one. I’m going to come back here in a second.

2. Small PDF

So the second one I recommend, which I have recommended for years, is Small PDF. Now Small PDF have a limit, so you can work on one free file daily. So that does make it a little bit tricky. But if you did prefer this app, then what you can do is you can go into just I would just do either the free trial and see if you can get all your stuff done in there or just subscribe to pro for a month and do all of your PDFs. Because that’s my approach, to subscribe to tools for a month if I need to.

So again, you’ll just scroll down until you find ‘Delete PDF Pages’ and then drop your PDF there. With this one, you actually just select your page for the little intel at the top and then apply the changes, and then you can just download it to your device, and that will tell you if you’ve used up all of your freebies. Now so Small PDF doesn’t lose the form fields, that’s good to know – this Small PDF doesn’t lose form fields.

Let’s just go back over to Tiny Wow, and we’re going to download that now because that’s finished processing. So we’re going to do the same thing. We’re going to save it to the device. Now you’ll see this is the Tiny Wow version because it’s got it up there in the title. Tiny Wow did take – strip – the form fields.

3. PDF Online

And the last one I wanted to talk about here was PDF Online. So this is similar to a small PDF in that it does have a restricted number. You can see down here I’ve got two free actions remaining today because I just wanted to be able to show you what you can do for free.

Now we choose “delete pages”, and it’s again the same deal. We just go and find a file, pop it in, and then in this instance, we want to unselect the ones we want to keep, and then we just delete those and then we can download that one. So we’ll see that PDF Online also did not strip the form fields out, so that’s actually quite a good thing to know, but it did remove our extra pages.

So, they have three apps you can use in your favourite web browser to delete pages from your PDF. Either for free or a low-cost monthly subscription if you have a lot of documents to edit. You’ll find the links for each website in the description box. So check them out and see which one you find easiest to use.

Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments. I’d love to hear if these tips were useful and which online PDF editor you plan to try next.

And let me know if you have a question about a different genealogy organisation, writing or design problem that you’d like me to answer. Look for the link to the Ask the Creative Family Historian submission form in the description below. I can’t wait to hear from you.

Well, that’s it for me. So I’ll see you in the next video. Until then, happy storytelling.

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Delete pages from your genealogy PDF worksheets