Before trying to merge the forwards and reverses together, reverse the first reverse sequence Sequence, Nucleic Acid, Reverse Compliment or control-shift-r and align it to your forward sequence usually I have to delete a few bases.
This is first video in a series of videos targeted to introduce different functions of BioEdit. O pen the Forward and Reverse ab1 files for your sequence with Bioedit. Bioedit is a DNA/protein sequence editor program designed for windows. In practice it is not as user-friendly as Sequencher. This tools will allow you to create boxes ans arrows and highlight restriction sites on your plasmid vector graphic. BioEdit allows you to assemble, view and edit contigs, and contains a clustal alignment algorithm.
This free software is intended to supply a single program that can handle most simple sequence and alignment editing and manipulation functions that researchers are likely to do on a daily basis, as well as a few basic sequences analyses.