Copy-paste into a primary text frame?

[MaradrX]

I have a number of sources where I'm pulling information and do not want to do the tedious File>Place then edit down.

The copy-paste seems only reserved for regular text frames or overriding the parent; I don't want this option since updates to the parent won't carry through.  

Is there another option I'm missing?  

[Eugene Tyson · Accepted solution]

@MaradrX  I think where things might be going sideways is in how you’re using your Parent Frames. Usually, you only want one primary text frame per Parent Page. The rest of the elements up there should really just be running headers, footers, folios, and any page decoration or numbering.

When you start working with your actual content, you override that primary frame once on the first live page, then thread your text from page to page (or use Smart Text Reflow). That way, the structure and position of the text frames still come from the Parent Page. If you later adjust margins or resize the parent text frame, those changes will flow through all the threaded pages automatically, as long as you haven’t manually resized or moved the live-page frames.

If you instead paste text directly into multiple separate text boxes, you’re effectively detaching them from the parent system. That’s why any later updates on the Parent Page don’t carry through you’ve broken the link.

As @BobLevine  mentioned, InDesign’s behaviour here is absolutely by design, and once you work with it rather than around it, it becomes very predictable. And @Mike Witherell  and @davecourtemanche  are spot on too the workflow really shines when you plan your parent setup before loading in the text.

Changing layout structure midway is always possible, but it’s a bit like trying to move the foundations after the house is built. It’s worth thinking of it as finishing at the beginning spend the time getting the Parent Pages right first, and everything that follows becomes a breeze.

Hope that clears up what’s happening it’s not a bug or an oversight, just InDesign doing exactly what it’s meant to. Once you get used to threading and working with Parents, it all clicks beautifully into place.

[MaradrX]

Thanks.  

I'm seeing that adding all of the text and items may be better than worrying about molding the final with parent pages... just going to use them as pretemplates instead of adjustments later.  Adding all text, pics, tables, items, etc. then going back to check that the word flow still works and adjusting fits and such before doing colors and other features.  

I'm used to tools having options for speed to getting things done so it conforms to my work flow instead of the other way around.  An example is pull down menus... I need to go 4 menus deep for a pop up window?  No way in 2025, give me a bar to type in the first 2-3 letters of an item, pick and go.  

[Mike Witherell]

That feature is called Quick Apply.

https://trainingonsite.com/185-adobe-indesign-quick-apply-shortcuts.html

[Eugene Tyson]

I agree with @Mike Witherell  on the quick apply - I use it regularly

Also, you can set keyboard shortucts to your most needed tools - and I've a bunch of custom keyboard shortcuts that suit my workflow. 

You'll find it under the Edit menu.

[BobLevine]

I understand the frustration but InDesign is a very powerful application that takes time to learn and a whole lot more time to master. If you're new to InDesign and find yourself saying there has to be a better/faster way, I can pretty much assure you that there is.

[Joel Cherney]

I'm used to tools having options for speed to getting things done so it conforms to my work flow instead of the other way around.  An example is pull down menus... I need to go 4 menus deep for a pop up window?  No way in 2025, give me a bar to type in the first 2-3 letters of an item, pick and go.  

As Mike has already pointed out, that feature does exist in InDesign. 

A few months ago, I was hanging out with this kid - a teenager - who was an Ableton whiz. I was giving him an introduction to FL Studio, right? He was great at arranging loops on his timeline, but there were large gaps in his music production knowledge. So when I moused over to the step-sequencer and started showing him how sample preparation worked differently when loading up a step-sequencer, he started whining about how my fussiness in sample preparation was a big waste of time, why wasn't there a tool to set start and endpoints in the sequencer?

The kid had literally never seen a drum machine. Beats were, for him, something that one bought in sample packs. He had never made a beat. I've been using FL since the 90s. And, before that, I used actual drum machines!  I tweaked the knobs on 909s. I recorded drums, processed the samples, and loaded them onto floppy disks. You don't need to have lived through the era before digital sampling to understand that the workflow for preparing individual drum samples might be different from that of preparing loops. 

Page layout applications like InDesign can be viewed in a similar way. The workflows you'd build for a publication rely on assumptions and conventions that date back to well before the era of desktop computing. You're currently in a thread full of people whose experience dates back to that era, where we produced publications with lightboxes and glue. And also we've all been developing workflows to handle complex publications in InDesign for decades. The point of my monologue here is that you should really pay attention to @davecourtemanche 's advice. You'd be better off asking for overall workflow advice, instead of banging your head against an interface that assumes that you know what you are doing.

All of these things that have come up in your thread - how to prepare text outside of InDesign, or how to build a template in InDesign that reduces repetitive labor when acquiring text from an external source - can be dealt with in a very wide variety of ways. There's no way to guess which way would work best for you, but I assure you, firing off frustrated posts about how you need to drill down four layers deep in a menu to find a function, when you don't, is not the best way to figure out how to build a workflow that will reduce the amount of work you need to do. 

[MaradrX]

"You're currently in a thread full of people whose experience dates back to that era, where we produced publications with lightboxes and glue."  Among them as well, welcome to the party.

Your FL Studio analogy is a strain on Godzilla's brain but I think I appreciate the angle.  If you know FL, then you know what I mean by speed and flow of what you are looking to do, out of the box, without add-ons.  Part of this is seeing how much I need to build in order to get to basics that other tools have already; I want to run out of the box but I need to take the time to build systems on top of the skeleton that it is... and I'm too impatient since it seems very 2015.  

[Joel Cherney]

If you know FL, then you know what I mean by speed and flow of what you are looking to do, out of the box, without add-ons. 

Nope! I've been writing  the tools I need myself. (Err... with lots of assistance, I mean! Or in many cases I've been using tools written by specialty developers for my industry.) But I don't expect it to do what I need to do out of the box, without add-ons. In FL Studio I do, sure. FL was never a tool that flagship publishers used to build workflows on which vast amounts of money depend. 

Not meaning to be snarky either, but I'm seeing there are workarounds and things developed on Github that seem to solve basic issues that long time users may bark about if they are moved/changed.

It comes off not only as snarky, but as ignorant. It's why I assumed you were brand new. The "long time users" that "may bark" are often large corporations, not people. The amounts of money & effort involved are not comparable. I could have built a similar metaphor for AutoCAD around kid with desktop 3d printer vs. someone working with a 6-axis CNC mill, but you were reading as young enough to maybe not see the comparison. 

[Joel Cherney]

very 2015.  

I will freely admit that not much has changed, UI-wise, in the last decade. Furthermore, whenever the devs try to write some kind of contextual 2020s-style Toolbar With Just The Tools You Need For The Thing You Are Clicking On Right Now, it's not particularly useful. The most recent such effort was pretty roundly panned, around here, mostly because it would only help newbie users apply a lot of bad local formatting without proper adjustment of paragraph and character styles. 

[leo.r]

No way in 2025, give me a bar to type in the first 2-3 letters of an item, pick and go.  

By @MaradrX

If you're on Mac, you can also do so by typing in the Help menu's search field. It's more "interactive" than the already mentioned Quick Apply option but will only search the main menu bar items. 

[Mike Witherell]

Although I'm still confused by what maradr really wants, and I'm confused by his statement that updating the parent page doesn't affect the live pages...  It seems to become a guessing game of "if I mistakenly do this and misunderstand the purpose of that, how can I get to an outcome I'm having a hard time describing that I really want?"

Without directly seeing what your file contains, such is the limitations of this online forum.

Maybe this thought will help:

Did you know you can make Object Styles for text frames that define height and width and where on the page the frame sits?

[MaradrX]

If you override the text on the page, the parent page no longer seems to update for the first page.  Adding pages after for overflow seems to work with them just fine - but not the first one where you did the override.

"Did you know you can make Object Styles for text frames that define height and width and where on the page the frame sits?" 

Yes, works well on the first setup and launching into it from there.

[Mike Witherell]

A subtlety that many miss is that if you override the text frame from parent to local page, you have to be careful not to move it--even a little bit, or else the update-ability of the parent to the override item will not seem to work.

[BobLevine]

I mentioned that to the OP multiple times and it just doesn't seem to be getting through. But the object styles is also a great idea.

[Flamboyant_fact0226]

Instead of manually using File > Place, use linked content or Data Merge. This works like your site’s dynamic content—updates in the source automatically appear, saving time and keeping everything consistent.

[BobLevine]

Once done in a data merge it's done. There's no link back to the data source. Additionally, the OP would be looking at way more time than it's worth to set up. And what site's dynamic content are you referring to.

Your post reads like something that ChatGPT would come up with using lousy sources. We're always happy to have new contributors here, but if you're going to do it, please do it with your own knowledge and experience not AI generated nonsense.