From the course: InDesign Secrets
185 Fixing three common Word formatting glitches - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
185 Fixing three common Word formatting glitches
- I am on a mission! To save InDesign users from having to deal with the nightmare that is known as formatting in Microsoft Word files. I even did a full course about it here on lynda.com called Using Word and InDesign Together. What I wanna do in this video is show you some of my favorite tips for wrassling those nasty Word documents down to the ground and gaining control. What I want to avoid having you do is going to Microsoft Word and selecting text and copying it and pasting it over because that means that you often lose a lot of the control over what InDesign can do to those Word files as it brings them in. So unless you just need to bring in a single sentence or paragraph or two, always, always place your Word files from the File menu here. Even if you just wanted to pick and choose from the same Word file throughout your document, you can place it onto the paste board. You don't have to place it into a live text frame. And then copy and paste from there. Select the file and make sure that Show Import Options is selected. It's a persistent setting so it'll stay selected the next time that you bring in a Word file. Here you have your choice of removing all the styles and formatting or preserving styles. Now if you have a nightmare of a Word file, where the Word user really tried their hardest to format it and it's just difficult to reformat in InDesign, then sure, go ahead and choose to remove the styles and formatting, bring it in close to plain-text. But please, always turn on Preserve Local Overrides. I see too many users who save out a Word file as text-only and then they have to print out the Word file and they spend all morning reapplying bold or reapplying italic to everything that the Word user had done. If you turn on Preserve Local Overrides, this will retain those occasional instances of bold and italic and bold italic. But in this case I wanna turn on Preserve Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables. Even if the Word user just used normal throughout, which they usually do, it can be a good starting point for you to find and apply the kind of styles that you wanna apply or to even create styles from that formatted copy. So I'm turning on the preserve styles and formatting option and then clicking OK. And now I'll go ahead and place just the first column of text. So, here's our first problem. Let's go back to the Word file. Is this red? No. But it's red here. If you've ever placed a Word file and gotten very strange formatting from the get-go, the first thing that you need to check is the Character Style panel. Because your character styles may have been accidentally set, let me get rid of this. The Character Styles panel was set to be red character style by default. That's not what we want. You always want your character styles to be the None styled by default and your Paragraph Styles to be Basic Paragraph. Get that set, double check with the Type tool. That when you switch to the Type tool, it's still there. And now I'll place that same file again with the same settings. And now, it's no longer red. So let's look at some other problems that we have in this document. Select this first paragraph, and open up the Paragraph Styles panel. And of course, it's Normal except for where they added some local formatting up here. This paragraph is Normal Plus because they added formatting on top of everything. So in other words, this Word user had created a new document and just didn't use any styles whatsoever. They did everything local formatting. That can be a help to you because you can easily target this kind of text to search and replace for your own styles. Or you can create a new style from it. So if I had something like this and I didn't have a subhead style that I wanted to apply, then I could just easily create a new style based on this. Now with your cursor blinking in that paragraph, just hold down the option or alt key and click on new paragraph style. And call it Subhead-fromword. Just so I know what's happening. And we want to base it on Basic Paragraph. We don't wanna base anything on Normal. And click OK. And apply our style, Subhead-fromword. So now it's using the Basic Paragraph as it's base so it switched to a good font, not a crazy font from Word, but still using the same kinda formatting. Let's zoom into this paragraph, I'm gonna click inside and press command, control plus a few times. One of the reasons why I want to retain the formatting is because I retain the italics and the bolds. This has been set as Normal, if I just click on Body, I still retain the italics. And the italics changed to the correct typeface. So Body uses Caslon Pro and now the italic is Adobe Caslan Pro. Occasionally, you'll find that it shows a missing font. You get the dreaded pink on top of here, but that's only because Microsoft Word used a format that doesn't exist in your current font. So you just have to change to a different style. So I think I just threw a whole bunch of tips at you but to me the main ones were, always place, always try to retain styles and always check that your character styles and paragraph styles are always set to the correct defaults when you're placing Word files.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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