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importing a Large Microsoft Word document into Indesign 2024 maintain the styles

New Here ,
Nov 01, 2023 Nov 01, 2023

Good Afternoon,

I have a 169 page Word Document,  size 8.5"x11".  My task is to import the Word document into Indesign size 6.75"x4.37" with 0.35 margins.  And I want to have the text to autoflow into Indesign. 

 

Is this possible?

Morris Davis

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How to , Import and export
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Community Expert ,
Nov 01, 2023 Nov 01, 2023
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Yes. InDesign has very, very good Word import with not just style preservation, but a sophisticated style mapping feature that allows you to tidy up and reassign styles as you like. The basic steps are these:

  • Clean up the Word doc. This is best done in Word, and not after importing. Make sure styles are organized and consistently applied; try to find and fix any spot formatting (replace with styles) and create basic character styles such as Bold and Italic and replace ALL spot use of those styles, Word-style, with the named styles. Also search-and-replace to remove all double whitespace: two spaces, space-Tab, usually Tab-Tab's, space-Return and Return-space, and all double paragraph returns. You may also want to remove all soft returns (line returns, Shift-Enter) as they are poor practice in InDesign. That's optional, though. Your doc might be a little messy at this point but don't worry about it.
  • Set up a new InDesign doc with margins, pages, etc. as you want them. It doesn't have to be perfect but close is helpful.
  • Import the Word file using Place into a first-page text frame, and be sure Show Import Options is checked in the file menu.
  • Try just a default style mapping to start with. If it's too messy, do further cleanup on the Word doc, and/or use the empty ID doc to create more refined styles with the same names.
  • Repeat the import until it's as good as you like as a starting point.
  • Format your way through, applying and adjusting styles as needed.

 

There are longer guides on how to do this out there, and a number of people who are highly expert at the task here — ask away!

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