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Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

Importing Text from Microsoft Word & keeping or removing the formatting

Daniel Walter Scott

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Introduction



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Hi there, in this video we're going to look at bringing in text into InDesign, and look at some special features when we're bringing in from something like Microsoft Word, where the top one here brings through all the formatting that was in Word, it had italics, and bolds. And this version here, it comes in all scrubbed and clean. Both versions are useful, let's look at how to do those.

First of all, I'm going to delete our Lorem Ipsum that we had before, because we've got the copy now, and we're going to bring it in. The easiest way is probably just to open the file in Word and copy, paste it, nothing wrong with that. But you probably don't need me to show you how to copy and paste text.

The other way you can do it in InDesign without having to open up Word, say you don't have Word, with your cursor flashing here, we can go to 'File', 'Place', like we did images. And in here, under '03 Newsletter', there's one called 'Article 1'. I'm going to click 'Open'. You can see, it's brought it all through into InDesign. One of the things it's done by default is that it's kept the formatting that was in Word, but say you don't want that, you don't want the bolds and all the italics because there's a lot of rubbish in there, let's say. I'm going to 'undo' it.

What you'll also notice is, when I undo, actually it's not completely gone, it's actually just ended up in my cursor, which is kind of a weird quirk. So, actually what I'm going to do is, instead of undoing, I'm going to select all the text, and just delete it. Now, to get my cursor back in there, I'm going to go to the W key. You can see the box a little easier. Let's get back to here, and let's go to 'File', 'Place'. But we're going to look at a little extra bit. This is why it's quite nice to use 'File', 'Place' rather than just copying and pasting from Word. It's these options down here, so I click on it without opening it, I click on 'Options'. And I'm going to go to 'Show Import Options', and click 'Open'. It looks kind of complicated but basically what I want to do is, this one here, it says 'Remove all the styles and text' from Word. Bring it in, you'll notice that it's just plain old text. Scrubbed off all the formatting.

One of the other ways of bringing in text, it's the same way, with a slightly different technique. We're going to use 'File', 'Place' but watch this, if I have nothing selected, and I delete this. Nothing selected, click in the background 'Black Arrow', go to 'File', 'Place'. I'm going to leave the same options on, so I'm going to make sure it says 'Show Import Options', which is great. But when I hit 'Article 1' and click 'Open', now because I don't have that text box already on the page, and I have my cursor in it, something slightly different is going to happen. So I'm going to make sure it removes style, perfect. But you can see, my cursor is loaded now. What I can do is just click, hold, and drag our box. So we end up at the same place, depends on what comes natural to you. Do you like to draw the text box first and then have your cursor in, and place it, or just go to 'File', 'Place', and make the text box at the exact same time. That's often what I do, but everyone's a little different for that one.

All right, so that's bringing in text from Microsoft Word, or pretty much any old text document. Now let's make some columns and things. See you in the next video.