How do I keep my text formating when pasting from other InDesign files?

I was struggling with this this morning and read this forum.  I know it's been years, but if anyone else has this problem, I think I found the solution.

I had a document from another person with their settings.  When I would copy and paste into this document, it would do exactly what the OP says, it would reformat all my text.

So, here's what worked.  I went to Paragraph Styles, Opened "Basic Paragraph", then clicked "No Paragraph Style" next to "Based on" and "Next Style".  THEN, I clicked "Reset to Base" (the button right next to it).  That's it!  This worked!  Now I can copy and paste text into this document without it reformatting.

Worth adding this to the thread even though it is quite old. But after experiencing the same problem, I figured out the (very easy and logical) solution.

In the source document just group the character styles into a new group with a unique name, and do the same with the paragraph styles.

Then you can copy/paste the content or move the pages into another document, and any styles with the same name will not conflict, as the groups are also copied over, so they are considered separate.

Easy. Hope that helps someone out there.

I just had this problem and then I couldn't changed the text to any font and I thought I was losing my mind... until I selected it all, went to the Character style palette, click 'None' - and bang-o! my formatting was back. I am not sure why this fixed it as nothing was using a character style from the other doc... but it's a weird bug.

You can load styles from other indd-document. You´ll find Load Styles commands from menus of Style Panels.

If you want to load Paragraph Styles,

1) open Paragraph Styles panel,

2) choose Load Paragraph styles (or All Text Styles) from panel menu, file choosing window opens.

3) Choose indd-file that has styles you want to load, and click OK.

4) After that you will have a list of all styles in that document, you can choose which styles you want to load at this point. When you hit OK again, you will have all the chosen styles in your current document.

I found the solution : before pasting your text in the new document, import the styles of the first document in the new one. You can do that with "Load All Text Styles..." in the dropdown of the Paragraph Styles panel.

Formatting is 100% good now!

Havent read all of this friends (my apologies if already posted), but you could try exporting indesign snippet and then import in the target document.

Having the same issue with CS6 on Mac. I made an ad based on Basic Paragraph, and just styled each line separately since it wasn't worth making a style for each separate line.

But when I copy and paste the information into another ID document, the styles are reset to using whatever Basic Paragraph is in the destination document. This must be a bug. Surely Copy and Paste should always preserve formatting unless you do something to remove it?

The only way I've found to fix it is to click on each line in the ad and make a new style (just "ad1", "ad2" etc will work). Then when I copy and paste the lines of styled text, the formatting is pasted correctly. (So manual editing of Basic Paragraph seems to be the issue.)

Alternate: If the copy has "no style" then it also seems to copy and paste ok. So if I delete "ad1" and "ad2" etc and replace those styles with "No paragraph style" (with Preserve Formatting enabled), then when I copy this unformatted text and paste it, the formatting is intact. But there doesn't seem to be a way to select a bunch of manually edited text and say "no style", is there?

I´m having the exactly same problem. Out of nowere this started happening to me.

All the styles applied to the text (both paragraph and character styles) get lost when copying > pasting text inside indesign...

I tried to reset the InDesign preferences already, but nothing changed.

Edit > Paste without formatting.

Bob