Convert an InDesign layout to editable Word format

- [Voiceover] If you're a designer who's laid out something very nicely in InDesign like this Globe Bank brochure here and your client says "Ah we love it, "but we need it in Word format to edit it." Does that strike fear in your heart? Does that turn hair white? Well, don't worry about it because I'm going to show you a very simple way to do so and if you are the client, if you're the Word user whose designer just refuses to convert an InDesign file to something that you can edit in Word, you need to show them this video or just show them how to do it after you watch the next few minutes. I think the first thing you need to do though is double-check that your client will have the fonts. If you go to the Type menu in InDesign and go down to Find Font, you can see all the fonts listed here. Most of these are from Typekit, which you get a free subscription to if you have InDesign CC or any CC product, but anybody could subscribe to Typekit. So your Word user could go to Typekit.com and subscribe for a year for about $50 and get access to these fonts or make sure and use true type fonts that they have or open type fonts that they have in the document and designers, you would of course include the cost of that in your quote. Anyway, assuming that you have a font situation figured out, the best way to create a layout is to export this to PDF and then use the Acrobat command export to Microsoft Word document to do your work for you. Really it does a fantastically great job. Let's go ahead and try that. So we're going to export this InDesign file to PDF and I'm going to use this time under the File menu one of the PDF presets. I'm gonna go with high quality print just because that's what I like and we'll save it on the desktop, GBdoc is fine, click Save. You can go through here and choose different options. If you're not familiar with this, if you're the Word user who's trying this out in InDesign, please watch any of the Getting Started with InDesign videos here on Lynda.com, but it's actually pretty simple. You want to export all the pages. You probably want to view the PDF after exporting. If you want to include any hyperlinks that have been embedded in the file, you can turn this on and then under Compression you can choose what do you want to do with the images and this particular preset, high quality print, gives you high-res images. If the images are going to be too large, then you could reduce this here and say oh they should be 200 for each one. I'll go ahead and do that actually. Monochrome should probably leave high res. Everything else really is fine as is and then click Export. So that was fast. It opened up in Acrobat. I'm gonna press Command or Control + zero to fit in window. Let's scroll through here and see what it got. It all looks great. Very nice. Okay so now we just go to Acrobat Pro's File menu and choose Export to Microsoft Word. We're gonna choose Word Document, which is the current version of Word, this would be an older version, choose Word Document and we'll put this on the desktop, GBdoc.docx. Stop for a second and go to Settings before you click Save. In Settings, you have your choice of two major kinds of export, retain flowing text and retain page layout. In most cases you're gonna want to choose retain flowing text and I'll show you why in a second. Your first inclination is to say oh I need to retain the page layout, that's the whole point of it. So you're gonna choose that. Go ahead and choose that. Whether or not you want to include images, we do want to include images and this is just if there's any scanned text, don't worry about it. Click OK and click Save. It might take a few seconds depending on how long and how complicated the document is and then it automatically opens up in Word. I'm gonna reduce the size of this Word document so you can see the job that it did and it did a fantastic job. This is all editable text. If I zoom in, it's fighting with me to edit it though because it's inside not like a regular text frame, it's inside some weird kind of frame that I'm not quite sure what Word calls, but you need to select it, right-click, and choose Edit Text and now you can actually edit the text to something else. Now, all these spots are coming through because I have them loaded on my system. If your Word user doesn't have them loaded on the system, then Word is either gonna fake it or it's gonna put in some weird special characters instead. But I'm gonna zoom out again and show you a problem with this document is that it is hard to edit. Every single paragraph is in its special little frame here and sometimes like with this page here, the pull quote, every line is in a separate frame. I'm gonna close this, not save it, and this time from Acrobat I will export to the other format. So Export to Microsoft Word, Word Document, we'll call this flowing and I'll include both of these, by the way, in the exercise files if you guys want to take a look at it yourself. But in Settings, turn on retain flowing text, leave everything else as is, click Save. Doesn't it look almost exactly the same as the other one? I mean, I thought that I would just get like a big long text file. But here it is in much easier to edit format. I'm gonna zoom in. Things are not inside the stand-alone frames anymore, they're in just regular text with indents I suppose is how it did its magic. But here you have an editable Word file converted from an InDesign layout. It probably needs some tweaks here and there, but still, I mean I think it's amazing. Look at this. There you go. So the best way to recreate an InDesign layout in editable Word format is to export it to PDF and then from PDF export it to Word as flowing text.