235 Easier style mapping from Word to InDesign

- [Voiceover] Sometimes clients or coworkers give you a Word file that they want you to import into your InDesign layout. You're going to have to apply styles to it, of course, but if you look at it in Word, you can see that somebody actually already applied a lot of styles. If I click inside this paragraph and I open up Word's styles panel, I can see that it actually has a paragraph style applied to it called Text Paragraph, this one's called Heading, and so on. Now, you may not like the names of these styles, or what they look like, but somebody did take the trouble to tag every one of these paragraphs, and often even characters with character styles.

Why do you wanna have to redo that work in InDesign? The ideal thing would be, if given a styled Word document, that you could map the word styles to your existing InDesign styles. Let me jump over to InDesign, here, and let's say that we wanted to bring in that Word file about GPS into this InDesign document. This InDesign document already has styles, we want to use these styles, not Word's. So you can map Word styles to InDesign styles, in fact I have a whole video course here on lynda.com called Using Word and InDesign Together, that goes into this in a lot of detail.

But in this InDesign tip, I want to show you a very common glitch that occurs when you try to map styles, and how to fix it. So let's go ahead and bring in the Word file. I'll go to File, Place. And select my Word file, and make sure that you have turned on Show Import Options, because you can only map styles in the Import Options dialogue box. I'll click Open. You want to preserve the styles and formatting, and then come down here and choose Customize Style Import.

Now you see a style mapping button, and here you can say, whenever Microsoft Word uses the Normal style, I want you to use the InDesign style called Basic Paragraph, when it uses Heading One, I want you to use this style called Headline, and so on. So you'd go through here, and what we're looking at, though is the glitch. Look at all these styles. There is no way that this Word document uses all these styles. There's only a couple paragraphs in it. And, for whatever reason, once were used in the Word document, but were since deleted.

Even though we made sure not to turn on Import Unused Styles, it still brings them in. So this is kind of like the most superfluous setting that there is in InDesign. It does nothing, really, with Word files. How do you get rid of all those extra styles? Because there's really no way to tell in that big list, which ones were actually used or not. Cancel out of here, if this happens to you. Here's the answer, create a new InDesign document. Don't work on this document, it makes no difference what this document looks like, it's temporary. We're going to delete it later.

And then place that Word file again into this file. Make sure Show Import Options is on. It should still be on because it's a sticky setting. And make sure that you're bringing in the styles, we're not gonna do any mapping, just bring in all the styles, click Ok. Just put it right here in one frame. You can see that it brought in the styles that it actually used. Now, click inside this frame with your type tool, and then go to File, Export.

And export this to rich text format. There is no export to Word format, but rich text format will do, because it includes all of the style names, and the paragraphs to which they've been styled, and Word can open this if necessary. We'll call this CleanGPS.rtf and click save. That's all, now go back to the original document, and let's place that RTF file that we just created.

There it is. Select it, make sure Show Import Options is turned on. Click open, come down here to Customize Style Import, Style Mapping. (gasps) Yes! Nice and clean. Now we know that these are the exact styles that are used in the document, and we can easily map them to a corresponding InDesign style.