From the course: InDesign Secrets

185 Fixing three common Word formatting glitches - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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185 Fixing three common Word formatting glitches

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- I am on a mission! To save InDesign users from having to deal with the nightmare that is known as formatting in Microsoft Word files. I even did a full course about it here on lynda.com called Using Word and InDesign Together. What I wanna do in this video is show you some of my favorite tips for wrassling those nasty Word documents down to the ground and gaining control. What I want to avoid having you do is going to Microsoft Word and selecting text and copying it and pasting it over because that means that you often lose a lot of the control over what InDesign can do to those Word files as it brings them in. So unless you just need to bring in a single sentence or paragraph or two, always, always place your Word files from the File menu here. Even if you just wanted to pick and choose from the same Word file throughout your document, you can place it onto the paste board. You don't have to place it into a live text frame. And then copy and paste from there. Select the file and make sure that Show Import Options is selected. It's a persistent setting so it'll stay selected the next time that you bring in a Word file. Here you have your choice of removing all the styles and formatting or preserving styles. Now if you have a nightmare of a Word file, where the Word user really tried their hardest to format it and it's just difficult to reformat in InDesign, then sure, go ahead and choose to remove the styles and formatting, bring it in close to plain-text. But please, always turn on Preserve Local Overrides. I see too many users who save out a Word file as text-only and then they have to print out the Word file and they spend all morning reapplying bold or reapplying italic to everything that the Word user had done. If you turn on Preserve Local Overrides, this will retain those occasional instances of bold and italic and bold italic. But in this case I wanna turn on Preserve Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables. Even if the Word user just used normal throughout, which they usually do, it can be a good starting point for you to find and apply the kind of styles that you wanna apply or to even create styles from that formatted copy. So I'm turning on the preserve styles and formatting option and then clicking OK. And now I'll go ahead and place just the first column of text. So, here's our first problem. Let's go back to the Word file. Is this red? No. But it's red here. If you've ever placed a Word file and gotten very strange formatting from the get-go, the first thing that you need to check is the Character Style panel. Because your character styles may have been accidentally set, let me get rid of this. The Character Styles panel was set to be red character style by default. That's not what we want. You always want your character styles to be the None styled by default and your Paragraph Styles to be Basic Paragraph. Get that set, double check with the Type tool. That when you switch to the Type tool, it's still there. And now I'll place that same file again with the same settings. And now, it's no longer red. So let's look at some other problems that we have in this document. Select this first paragraph, and open up the Paragraph Styles panel. And of course, it's Normal except for where they added some local formatting up here. This paragraph is Normal Plus because they added formatting on top of everything. So in other words, this Word user had created a new document and just didn't use any styles whatsoever. They did everything local formatting. That can be a help to you because you can easily target this kind of text to search and replace for your own styles. Or you can create a new style from it. So if I had something like this and I didn't have a subhead style that I wanted to apply, then I could just easily create a new style based on this. Now with your cursor blinking in that paragraph, just hold down the option or alt key and click on new paragraph style. And call it Subhead-fromword. Just so I know what's happening. And we want to base it on Basic Paragraph. We don't wanna base anything on Normal. And click OK. And apply our style, Subhead-fromword. So now it's using the Basic Paragraph as it's base so it switched to a good font, not a crazy font from Word, but still using the same kinda formatting. Let's zoom into this paragraph, I'm gonna click inside and press command, control plus a few times. One of the reasons why I want to retain the formatting is because I retain the italics and the bolds. This has been set as Normal, if I just click on Body, I still retain the italics. And the italics changed to the correct typeface. So Body uses Caslon Pro and now the italic is Adobe Caslan Pro. Occasionally, you'll find that it shows a missing font. You get the dreaded pink on top of here, but that's only because Microsoft Word used a format that doesn't exist in your current font. So you just have to change to a different style. So I think I just threw a whole bunch of tips at you but to me the main ones were, always place, always try to retain styles and always check that your character styles and paragraph styles are always set to the correct defaults when you're placing Word files.

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