229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel

- I don't know about you, but I have at least six different versions of InDesign on my hard drive and files saved in various versions too. I want to show you a way that you can convert all of your old version documents to your current version document in one fell swoop or maybe two or three fell swoops because this is a very common problem these days with the Creative Cloud coming out with new versions every few months. Let's say, for example, that you're on CS6, InDesign CS6, which I have open right here on screen.

And here's just a simple document, and I'm going to close it right now. Let's say that you have all of your documents in CS6 or most of them, and you have finally moved to InDesign CC. Right now I'm at 2015, CC 2015. You know that if you open up a document in InDesign CC 2015 or any later version, you choose Open, and you choose an early document like, say, this one called simple that I just had open. Well, we're missing some images, but that's okay.

But here's the problem is that it says converted. What a pain, and so to save it in 2015, you really need, if I just choose Save, then it says, "Where do you want to save it "and what do you want to name it?" And sometimes it won't remember where you pulled it up from, and it's such a pain in the butt. So I'm going to click Cancel, and I'm going to close this without saving any changes. Here is a faster way to convert all these without having to go through and saving each individual document. All right, start in your older programs, so in this instance, CS6.

This is where the format that all of your InDesign files are in that you want to convert, and go to the File menu and choose New, Book. We're going to collect all of the CS6 documents or a whole bunch of them. It could be a couple hundred if you wanted. Right now I'm just going to do about 10, and we're going to add them to this book. I'll call this to be converted and save it on my desktop. We're not actually going to do anything with this book. We're not going to renumber chapters or anything crazy like that. We're just going to use it as a collection.

So I've created the book. One thing you want to do before you start adding documents is go to the book panel menu, go down to Book Page Numbering Options, and turn off Automatically Update Page and Section Numbers. You don't want the book panel to do anything to your documents that you are not in control of, such as this. We're not actually creating a book. We're just using it as a way to collect documents. And then you can click the plus symbol to add documents from your hard drive, or you can go to your hard drive to the File Explorer or to the Finder and drag and drop files over here.

Because my folders are scattered in a few different locations, I'm actually going to do it like this. So I'm going to shift, click these and then hold down the command or control key to get these other guys because I don't want to have to move all these to a single directory. I want to keep them in place and overwrite them so that they're up-to-date with the new version. So I'll add all those. And while I have these open here, you see it didn't renumber any pages, I'm going to come down here, and I'm going to choose Automatic Document Conversion.

In my experience, I have to choose that again in the next step, but that's all I've done. You just go through your hard drive, you collect them all. You might have 200 documents you want to convert in one fell swoop. Go ahead and do that. And close it, save your changes to the book. This is all done in your old version of the program. Now go to the new version, here is CC 2015, and open the book. Don't open the files, open the book. File, Open, Desktop, to be converted. Going to get a little dialog box reminding us to choose Automatic Document Conversion and click OK.

Everything seems to be the same. Automatic Document Conversion is still turned on. Now what you need to do is do an action that affects every single document in this book. And the one thing I found that works the best is to choose Update Numbering, Update Chapter and Paragraph Numbers because we've turned off Book Page Numbering Options, so this doesn't usually affect anything. I'll go ahead and do that. And now it's thinking, and it's going through here, and it's putting little dot as it's finishing working on these documents.

That's it, we're done. We can close the book. I'm not going to save any changes. And now when I open up the documents, let me stay in CC 2015. I'll go to File, Open, and let's open up that simple one again. And missing sources, yes, of course. But, look, no more converted. Let's try another one. Let's go into arthistory.indd. Missing images, that's fine.

No converted, it is a CC 2015 file. Isn't it incredible? I love this feature. Now, one thing is that there is a script that could make life even easier than this because you don't need to create a book and do any of that kind of stuff. It is written by Peter Kahrel, who is a wonderful person who writes lots of free scripts for InDesign users. It's called batch convert or batch-process. The problem that I found with using this, though it does work in CC 2015, is that, though you can point to one master folder and say include subfolders and you can overwrite existing files, it doesn't remember the subfolder structure, so it doesn't put them in those subfolders.

It puts them all one layer above. I don't know what the problem is. I would check with Peter Kahrel's script first if you need to do a whole lot of these to see if he's updated this or maybe just practice it on your own with some sample files. And this might be a little faster than working with the book feature, but if this hasn't been updated or you just want to do it really quickly without having to install any scripts, go ahead and try this cool method of using the book panel to convert your documents.