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Known Participant
October 17, 2024
Question

How to avoid having to remap paragraph styles when relinking linked Word document?

  • October 17, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 801 views

I received a set of InDesign files and an associated Links folder containing linked content. The main story flow of the InDesign document is linked from a Microsoft Word document in the Links folder. This is not how I would have set it up, but it is what it is. I guess the author wanted to continue modifying text after layout and was unwilling to learn how to use InCopy.

 

Now that I have received this package as zip file package, I need to set it up to start working on it in my local evironment. When I open the InDesign file, it tells me all the links need to be updated. If I select the option to Update Links, all of the paragraph styles for the text linked from the Word document go haywire. How do I prevent this from happening?

 

Correct paragraph styles, but with out-of-date links:

 

Updated links, resulting in overwritten paragraph styles. All paragraphs get overwritten with whatever paragraph style happens to be selected in the paragraph styles menu:

 

Is there a way to set it to not re-set paragraph styles when updating links?

1 reply

BobLevine
Community Expert
October 17, 2024

I cannot possibly recommend this workflow natively. If you really need to link Word documents then I strongly suggest Wordsflow from em Software.

Known Participant
October 17, 2024

Don't worry, you are preaching to the choir. The only reason I want to update the link is so I can Unlink, but that option is greyed out as long as the link is out-of-date, so I am stuck in a Catch-22!

BobLevine
Community Expert
October 17, 2024
Try deleting or moving the Word file so it shows as a missing link. If you still can't kill it, then try exporting to IDML and opening that.