Adobe InDesign/Importing text

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Expert: InDesign Pro - 4/29/2009


Question
I have a document that I will have to import into InDesign CS3 from word, and will need to change all the headings and subheadings etc into a certain style. I was wondering if there is an easy way to do this that will automatically recognise a heading and change it to a set style when it imports or is it a matter of setting paragraph styles etc and applying once it is imported?

Thanks

Answer

InDesign's Style Mappi
Hi Nicola, thanks for the question.

Actually, there's a very easy way to do this. It's called Mapping your styles. When you import your Word document into InDesign, you will have to ensure you already have styles set up in InDesign (and Word) for this to work.

When your Import dialog box is open and you highlight the Word document you'd like to import, hold down the Shift key when clicking the Open button. This will open the Import Options dialog. At the bottom of the dialog box, select Customized Style Import and click on the Style Mapping button. This will bring up the Style Mapping dialog (see my uploaded image).

Here, you *map* the styles from the Word document in the left column, to the existing character- and paragraph styles in the InDesign document in the left column.

You're also able to map multiple Word styles to a single InDesign style if the Word document author went a little crazy with too many styles.

Another tip is this: You may not have a style to match all the styles in Word, but your Word styles will import automatically. You'll know they are from Word because they will have a little floppy disk icon beside them. If you want to map these styles to any InDesign styles, you can simply delete them and InDesign will ask you if you want to map them to an existing style.

Hope this helps, if you have any other questions, let me know. Thanks.

Scott
    Questioner's Rating
    Rating(1-10)Knowledgeability = 10Clarity of Response = 10Politeness = 10
    CommentThanks for your help - does exactly what I want!! I have a couple of InDesign books but none of them mention this.


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