Complex master text threading

[Chloe Dinh]

Hello everyone,

I am creating a planner for next year using InDesign and I am having a little problem with master page text threading (not sure if I am calling it correctly, since I am a beginner with InDesign). Essentially, what I am trying to achieve is to have a different date (January 1st on one page, January 2nd on second page, and so on) on my "Daily View" pages, but those are sometimes separated by "Weekly view" or "Monthly goals". Bellow is a screenshot that should make it more clear.

I found a partial answer to how to solve my problem here​, where I used BarbBinder's Excel solution to insert dates on subsequent pages. This worked when I was experimenting before I created all the master pages. I was not able to use this solution, however, when the pages are separated by different master page.

I am not sure if this is any relevant, but I am not able to set the text box as the "document's primary text flow" even though I was able to set it earlier for the same text box. Although I was able to set the text box as document's primary text flow, I did not need it to achieve what I needed when I was experimenting with BarbBinder's example.

When I try to follow BarbBinder's instructions with the whole document ready, what I get is this. (The cursor does not change to the autoflow with parentheses, just autoflow)

A second, much less important thing I would like to achieve with autoflow, would be to have week ranges on each "week view". For example, for week one, I would have "January 1st - 7th 2018", like in the picture bellow.

I do not even know if it is possible to do such thing in InDesign, but what I was thinking was that I would have one text thread for the "daily view master page" and one text thread for the "weekly view master page".

Is it possible to achieve what I am trying to do?

Thank you everyone for your help.

[Cari Jansen · Accepted solution]

Using two text threads makes things difficult I believe. as you'd need to create different Sections for the Day and Week views. I'd opt to create a SINGLE Excel file with all the headers in it. E.g. insert the week ranges in the correct spots, so you can rely on a single import. For the primary text frame (header for date/week range text), ensure that text frame is NOT threaded/linked to other frames on the page.

Master page set-up:

• I'd opt to create a single Master Page with JUST the header frame (Primary text frame) on it, and call this 'header-Base' or something.
• Then ensure that all the other master pages are BASED on this master page (right now they are based on 'Front Page' it seems??), and  add the additional design elements to additional master pages.

Paragraph style set-up:

• Also I'd ensure that the paragraph style you apply to the text in the header, should have 'Start on Next Page' Keep option enabled

To apply the right page designs to your pages:

• once you've got all the text run-in and pages created, you can then apply the various master pages to page ranges to get the planner design elements added (e.g. week days, to do, schedule notes design elements).

[Chloe Dinh]

Thank you so so much for the quick, detailed, and helpful response!

I have not thought of that smart solution, but it works perfectly.