Import text from Word and apply InDesign styles

Besides Barb's spot-on instructions, I (and many of us who do this a lot) fully clean up the Word doc before importing it. Some of Barb's steps, like replacing spot italic and bold with defined character formats, is an example. But deleting all extra white space, making sure every paragraph has an assigned style, replacing all spot formatting with defined character styles.... the cleaner the Word doc is, the better the result on import will be, and you'll have to do lots less fixing up in InDesign.

Hi Grundoon Groundhog:

I rely on style mapping, which allows me to map Word styles to InDesign styles. This requires that the Word users assign the styles in Word (and the default style names are fine) and then I map them to the InDesign equivalents on import. For example, Word has default styles for Title, Heading 2 and Heading 2 — if the equivalent styles in my InDesign document are Title, Subtitle and Subtitle 2—I just tell in InDesign and the document comes in with the styles already assigned.

Then I do a few more things to make sure that everything is correct:

• I work with the Style Override Highlighter (+) enabled so that I can see where text isn't conforming to its definition,
• I search for inline formatting like italics and replace with an italics character style (same with bold and small caps)
• then, I select all and click the Clear Overrides button (¶*) at the bottom of the Paragraph styles panel

See https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/map-export-manage-styles.html and https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/paragraph-character-styles.html

~Barb 

When you import Word text show the import options. There is a section to replace Word styles with existing InDesign styles. There are often inconsistencies in the Word formatting. At the end select the complete text and from the Paragraph Style Panel Menu select Clear Overrides.