3.4 Using Word to Import Text

Hi everyone. In this lesson, we're going to import text from Word into our magazine design. Now this is more than likely gonna happen quite a bit for you as you're working through your magazine, especially if outside sources are creating articles for inclusion in your magazine. That could be formatted in so many different ways. More than likely, it's typed up in Word, and you may be given the Word doc, so how do you get that into your template easily and efficiently and perhaps even retain some of that original formatting so you don't have to go through and manually change all of that. So we are back in our template. Basically for these beginning sections I'm just working on the same pages here because you're going to apply these techniques throughout your design. So it's not a matter of having a actual real life situation for this, more just how do you do it? So in this case I'm just going to have an article ready to go. Now as you're designing your magazine if you know, this is how I work. There are a lot of times where you are waiting on content, just waiting and it gets a little crazy when you're working on a deadline. So if you're waiting for actual content, you can style the page to the most of your ability and then just drop in that content saves you so much time instead of starting from scratch once that content arrives. So this is a good example of that where you could have your overall masthead ready to go. You just have to change what this text actually says once that article arrives. So in this case, we have that we know what the headline is going to be. We know who the author is going to be and then we have some engaging text goes here. And then you have space right here. So you've pretty much mapped out what you have available to you as far as space goes for your article and now you just need to import it from word. So to do that, it is so simple in In Design, you just go to file, place and an option pops up for you to navigate to that document. It's a good idea to keep all of your related magazine items together because if your magazine is large you can have a lot of content building up. And here is the trick. You click on your work document. This can be any version, it doesn't have to be the latest and greatest. But you want to make sure that Show Import Options is checked. And then you hit Open. And then Options come up to you for your Word import. And you can actually set different presets to this if this is a common import that you do. But just take a look here. You can add a table of contents, index, endnotes, footnotes if that's available in the document. You can use the typographer's quotes, you can have the option to remove any styles and formatting from the text and tables in Word, so if you want to have ultimate freedom to style this article the way that you want, you can just select that and it'll remove any styling from your word document. Or you can preserve the already in place styles. This is entirely up to you. Something you may want to check with both, because it's such an easy Import option. You can almost import the article with the style, see what it looks like. Import the article without the style, and see what it looks like. And the one area where styling becomes crucial to retain is if your author is using a lot of italics. Because if you have to go back through the entire article and find out what's italicized and what is not, that could be extremely time consuming. So it may be worth it to retain that style, and go through, and then you can apply an overall styling after that. You can also import any graphics, any unused styles, convert bullets and numbers to text if you want to. And then you can have the option to either input those styles automatically using your paragraph styles, which is neat. If you work really well with your author and they use Word in conjunction with your style in InDesign, you can use what InDesign has in place or you can redefine that if you want to. For both of your paragraph and character style conflicts. Now what happens is if there's a conflict this setting is going to say use what ever end design has. And then that will auto populate. And then you have the option to customize that even further if you want to. So you can save this preset if you're ready or you can not if it's something that you don't change too much. But when you hit OK, you're gonna have the option to place this text. Now we're gonna place it here and a couple things are gonna happen. I did this on purpose. This does not look the way that we want it to look and you can see here I just used fake text and that this author credit and article title was at the top, which is essentially what we would be putting in this space. So we can actually go ahead and remove that. Automatically from our document. But again this is not looking the way that we want and that's okay because quickly we can go over to our character style and notice that we had the H1 headline selected and in reality we want this to be our body text. And as soon as we click that, the entire paragraph is changed now to whatever style we had for our body. And if you want to, you can format this into a couple different columns. You can go crazy now with this layout to get it to fit into the white space that you have available to you. You notice here, that you might even have a couple options for photos, which is great. So that is one very quick and easy way to import that word text into your document, and you can further style it from there, or you can take the styles the author already applied. It's entirely up to you.