How to Import a Microsoft Word Document into Adobe InDesign
I teach graphic design, and I’ve caught some of my students copy and pasting from Microsoft Word into Adobe InDesign. This works fine, but can waste a lot of time since you can lose formatting and encounter strange ways the two programs translate.
Luckily, we can import a .docx document straight into Adobe InDesign, and have all of the pages automatically fill out.
My Word document is for a booklet I am formatting for our graduates. I have it merged from Excel, and in Word it is styled a certain way. I have four fields:
- The students’ names.
- Their projects’ names.
- Their projects’ descriptions.
- Their email addresses.
In Microsoft Word, the styles are as follows:
- Student name: Heading 1
- Project name: Heading 2
- Project description: Body
- Email address: Subtitle
Because my styles have been set up in Word, it means I can map them to paragraph styles I have assigned in Adobe InDesign.
To import your Word document, we’re going to Place it. You can go File and then Place, or use the shortcut Cmd+D or Ctrl+D.
Find your file, and make sure ‘Show Import Options’ is ticked on. Import options will allow us to retarget the paragraph styles.
You’ll be greeted with this dialogue box. You can experiment with the options here if you want, but I am going to click the option for ‘Customise Style Import’.
Then, I’ll click the button ‘Style Mapping’ to choose which InDesign styles correspond to the different Word styles.
Once everything is set, then I’ll click ‘OK’ on both dialogue boxes. This will load my cursor with my Word document.
Now, you can either click and drag to create your text boxes and deal with the overset text, or you can hold shift and click once. This will fit your text boxes to the size of your margins, create new pages to match how many you need for the amount of text you have, and thread all of those text boxes so the text flows from one text box to the next.
You’ll notice when you hold shift your cursor shows you what it’s going to do.
And then my document is all imported!
And you can see that all of those text boxes are automatically threaded:
And that’s all there is to it. In the next tutorial, I’ll show you how to import your Word document as a live link, so when you update the contents in Word, it can update in Adobe InDesign.
