Style mapping and "local" formatting

Yes, this is a long-standing bug with InDesign's import/place utility.

InDesign's import filter leaves residual formatting code crud in the file, even if you map Word styles to InDesign styles. Here are a couple of scenarios we use at our studio.

1. If the Word author has used Word's styles to format the file (I know this is Utopia, but we have trained many clients to do this):

• File / Place and check Show Import Options.
• At the Options dialogue, select Preserve Styles and Formatting (mid-way down the dialogue) and the Customize Style Import / Style Mapping.
• In the Style Mapping dialogue, choose how you want to handle each Word style found by InDesign: choose an existing InDesign style in your layout, [New Paragraph Style] automatically creates a new style based on the Word style's formatting, or New Paragraph Style... (at the bottom) lets you define a new style on the fly.
• Note that this utility will "see" more styles in Word than were actually used in the .DOCX file. If the author, at any time during the doc's creation (even years ago in an earlier edition), selected a Word style but then formatted the text differently, residual code crud in Word still says that style is in use and it's picked up by InDesign's import utility. Just ignore them; we find they're harmless and rarely actually end up being carried into the InDesign layout. We set each of these phantom styles to [New Paragraph Style]: if the style truly was used, you'll get a new style in InDesign's Paragraph/Character styles panel and you can then deal with it. If it's Word's residual code crud, it's usually not imported into your layout at all.
   
• The gotchas you'll have to correct:
  • If a character style was applied in Word (such as red italics), it most likely will still have red italics applied to it in your layout as a manual override, even if you mapped the Word character style to an InDesign character style (such as blue bold). With the text tool, Select All and click to remove the manual overrides. You'll now see your intended InDesign character style on that text. *** This is an InDesign bug that Adobe should correct.
  • The Character styles panel will show a handful of empty character styles pulled in from Word. They are Word crud that was carried into InDesign. (Word sometimes blends character styles into paragraph styles which causes this problem.) *** This is an InDesign bug that Adobe should correct.

2. If the Word author manually formatted the entire Word.docx file:

• Strip the file clean using InDesign's import options.
• File / Place and check Show Import Options.
• At the Options dialogue, select Remove Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables (at the top of that section) and UNcheck Preserve Local Overrides.
• You should end up with plain unformatted text in the layout that you can now style with your own Paragraph and Character styles.
   
• The gotchas you'll have to correct:
  • We often find some residual manual formatting left on the text, so with the text tool, Select All and click to remove the manual overrides. You'll now have cleaned text. *** This is an InDesign bug that Adobe should correct.

Final note: You'll always have better text coming into the layout if you control what comes in with Show Import Options.  Choose either method to get rid of all Word formatting crud. 

Hope this helps.

I just ran into this with a large book import, and had it confirmed by another user. It's a new(ish) bug in that the import will assign all the correct styles but not override the Word formatting—if you have turquoise italics in Word and map them to a red bold style in ID, the "RedBold" character format will be applied, but the text will remain overridden as turquoise italics.

My solution was to do a search and replace of paragraph returns, by style, and reapply the paragraph format to each. A little tedious, but it worked.

—

1. In Word I apply to all italics, bold, etc. a character style.
2. I import the Word document
3. Select all > Paragraph Style Panel Menu > Remove Overrides.
4. I delete all word styles and replace them, if the styling is needed with my InDesign style, others, which are not needed with no style.