Source text in InDesign

[Hanne Sofie]

Hello,

I'm making menus for a customer. They have menus in several different formats, but with the same text content.

I'm sure that there is a way to have a source document I can edit, and then prices and other text elements are automatically updated in the different menus – but I can't find out how. Can anyone point me in the right direction? (Copy/paste is one option, I know, but not ideal.)

Thank you.

[BobLevine · Accepted solution]

You could do this with InCopy stories or, if you're really daring a linked Word document.

[Hanne Sofie]

Not brave enough to mess with Word. 😄 

But I'll check out InCopy stories, thank you very much!

[Hanne Sofie]

I can't believe I haven't looked at InCopy before. That was magic. Thank you again!

[John Mensinger]

I do a lot of that exact thing using the Content Collector tools (and strict application of styles).

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/linked-content.html

[Hanne Sofie]

Have not checked out Content Collector tools, but InCopy (also with strict application of styles) was the perfect solution to my problem. 🙂

[SJRiegel]

You could use data merge, with the source document being csv or tab-delimited text saved from Excel

[Hanne Sofie]

I actually tried that once, but it was an impossible task to get it right with menus containing up to 120 different dishes. 😄 

InCopy did the trick.

[Document Geek]

If your text elements are short and won't have line breaks, you may want to look into custom variables.

How long are your text elements?

[Hanne Sofie]

Well, the menus may have up to 150 elements of different kinds.

I checked out InCopy, as mentioned in the first reply, and that was exactly what I was looking for. 🙂

But thank you for helping!