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hadleyk78468788
hadleyk78468788
Known Participant
November 3, 2022
Answered

Footnotes not importing from Word

  • November 3, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 500 views

Hello!

I'm working on Mac Monterey InDesign 17.2.

I work for many clients who send Word documents and most of the time I have no problem importing the Word dcouments with footnotes into InDesign.

However, one client's Word documents consistently have problems with importing footnotes. The footnotes don't pull in (the documents are also always incredbly slow to format in InDesign, after import).

I know there are workarounds, but I'd like to find out why so that I can tell them what to do with their Word documents so we don't have this problem anymore as it really slows down the workflow.

I work with multiple Word documents in multiple InDesign files every day, and this one client's documents always have problems. As an example, today I imported 4 Word documents into 4 different InDesign files (newly created by me and older InDesign files), and only their's was problematic.

I've discussed it with them and I know the Word document was originally a Google Document and that it has travelled between different people adding, editing, track changes, etc, before it arrives to me.

Does anyone know why this happens? I know what to do as a workaround, but I'd like to stop the problem from happening, if possible.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer James Gifford—NitroPress

Word is a fragile format in general, especially when it comes to footnotes (and even more so end notes), and it slowly corrupts when edited multiple times by multiple users... even without any conversion from Docs or Pages or anything involved.

 

One of the things that Word and ID have in common is that files bloat with time and editing, stuffing the back end with undo info and all kinds of junk related to image preview, doc links and such. This bloat also contributes to corruption in both apps.

 

The fix in both is to export the file to an intermediate format, then reopen it and save again in the native format. This strips tons of junk from files and often fixes many corrupted elements as well.

 

For Word, export to RTF and then reopen and save as DOCX. Since this is not a guaranteed or risk-free operation, do this only with copy files, not a sole master or archive copy. For ID, if you encounter problematic files there, export to IDML and reopen and save as INDD.

 

Try the export/save with your Word file and see if the footnotes import correctly.

 

2 replies

James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPressCorrect answer
Legend
November 3, 2022

Word is a fragile format in general, especially when it comes to footnotes (and even more so end notes), and it slowly corrupts when edited multiple times by multiple users... even without any conversion from Docs or Pages or anything involved.

 

One of the things that Word and ID have in common is that files bloat with time and editing, stuffing the back end with undo info and all kinds of junk related to image preview, doc links and such. This bloat also contributes to corruption in both apps.

 

The fix in both is to export the file to an intermediate format, then reopen it and save again in the native format. This strips tons of junk from files and often fixes many corrupted elements as well.

 

For Word, export to RTF and then reopen and save as DOCX. Since this is not a guaranteed or risk-free operation, do this only with copy files, not a sole master or archive copy. For ID, if you encounter problematic files there, export to IDML and reopen and save as INDD.

 

Try the export/save with your Word file and see if the footnotes import correctly.

 

hadleyk78468788
hadleyk78468788Author
Known Participant
November 3, 2022

Thank you for the explanation, this is what I was looking for.

 

I already know the workaround, I wanted to know if I could stop it from happening in our workflow, but it seems not.

James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
November 3, 2022

Only by user education of a level that is not possible in most organizations, and less possible in ad-hoc communities that contribute content and so forth.

 

I once managed the working end of a firm in which reports had to be continually maintained by a population of supervising consultants. The Word docs turned into Frankensteinian nightmares and cost hours and hours of fixing and reformatting. The senior staff complained and complained... but absolutely would not follow some simple guidelines such as using styles, occasionally doing the above strip-and-clean operation, or anything.

 

I am currently working on a large doc project cleaning up a Word template library under similar circumstances; the three-page "really, folks, this is easy" instructions for the new model completely blew away the VP who's been tearing his hair out over the downstream problems. Maybe he'll be able to get them to follow the rules.

 

All of which is why I tend to think very little of most Word users, especially as the complaints and problems are inversely proportional to their willingness to learn one or two new simple things. They just don't have time for fancy-dancy things like using three or four styles. They're already too busy hand-reformatting 30 page documents every day.

 

You might just convert to RTF and import from there as a standard workflow, and see if that helps.

 

Willi Adelberger
Community Expert
Willi AdelbergerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 3, 2022

Resavde the Word documents as DOC and import them.

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